The Cutting Edge

Occupy Planet Earth: Resisting the Militarisation of the State

2011-12-02T18:28:00.001Z

Published on Counterpunch

Viva L’Occupation

The Occupy Movement is currently the most vocal manifestation of public resistance and civil disobedience to hit the West since the 60s. In turn, it has elicited a concerted and in some ways unprecedented militarisation of state violence. In the US, the deployment of tear gas, pepper-spray and rubber bullets has deliberately brutalised peaceful, civilian protestors – purely in the name of restoring ‘civil order’. More than ever, the insistence by people on reclaiming public spaces in the name of opposing the injustice and inequality meted out by the proverbial “1 per cent” is unpeeling the mask of the democratic state, to reveal the unrestrained monopoly of wealth and weapons on which its power is premised.

Unlike previous twentieth century protests, the Occupy Movement is distinguished by its genuine spontaneity, its leaderless dynamic, and its organic global proliferation through the streets of major industrial cities in the North. The driving force of Occupy, however, is not just the escalating global economic recession, although the latter’s role in galvanising grievances shouldn’t be underestimated. Rather, the determination of citizens to occupy strategic public spaces is inspired by a convergence of public perceptions.

The majority of people now hold views about Western governments and the nature of power that would’ve made them social pariahs ten or twenty years ago. The majority are now sceptical of the Iraq War; the majority want troops out of Afghanistan; the majority resent the banks and financial sector and blame them for the financial crisis; most people are now aware of environmental issues, more than ever before, and despite denialist confusion promulgated by elements of fossil fuel industries, the majority in the US and Britain are deeply concerned about global warming; most people are wary of conventional party politics and disillusioned with the mainstream parliamentary system, due to the continuation of scandal after scandal. In other words, on a whole range of issues, there has been a massive popular shift in public opinion toward a progressive critique of the current political economic system. It is, of course, largely subliminal, not carefully worked out, and lacks a coherent vision for what needs to be done – but there can be little doubt that this shift has happened, and is deepening.

People are increasingly disenchanted with prevailing socio-political and economic structures, and they are hungry for alternatives. Yet they see none readily available, no existing mechanism which allows their voices to be truly heard – what left to do, then, beyond simply occupying public space in an effort to, somehow, reclaim power?

Civil Contingencies: State-Preparations for Counter-Insurgency

Yet as the global economic recession began to kick in since 2008, the “1 per cent” – or elements thereof – were well aware that one of the immediate consequences would be citizens taking to the streets. And they were preparing for it.

In late 2008, an internal client memo from US bank and Federal Reserve member Citigroup, authored by chief technical strategist Tom Fitzpatrick, warned unequivocally of “continued financial deterioration, causing further economic deterioration, with the risk of a feedback loop.” This will “lead to political instability… Some leaders are now at record levels of unpopularity. There is a risk of domestic unrest, starting with strikes because people are feeling disenfranchised.”

What to do? One answer to that question was put out by the US Army Strategic Studies Institute in December that year, in a report urging the US military to prepare for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States” provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse”, “loss of functioning political and legal order,” or “purposeful domestic resistance and insurgency”, among other threats. The report warned that Department of Defense resources may need to be put “at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquillity” – including “the use of military force… against hostile groups inside the United States.” The noble aim of such state militarisation is, of course, to “restore public order and protect vulnerable populations” – from themselves, it would appear.

Similarly, in the UK since 2004 the government has held extraordinary emergency powers granted under the little-known Civil Contingencies Act. The Act paves the way for the rise of totalitarian state power. Under the powers enabled by the Act, the government can unilaterally decree a state of emergency at its own discretion without public consultation or parliamentary approval. Once a state of emergency is declared, all manner of powers can come into play. Ministers can introduce new laws, “emergency regulations”, by Royal Prerogative without recourse to parliament. These laws can include anything from destroying or confiscating property, banning protests and public assemblies of any kind, instituting curfews, prohibiting travel, deploying the army on British soil, sealing off whole cities, shutting down websites, censoring media, and so on. Worse still, the state could classify whatever it wants as new criminal offences.

“CIVIL CONTINGENCIES ACT” CLIP FROM THE UPCOMING DOCUMENTARY ‘THE CRISIS OF CIVILIZATION’:

The problem is that the Act has nothing to do with responding to real emergencies. According to the journal of the British Association of Public Safety Communication Officials, the government has “no clear direction or dedicated budget and a complete lack of Act-specific assessment” relevant to actually preparing the country for concrete national emergencies or disaster scenarios. They rightly ask, “If the Government is truly committed to protecting the nation, why are Ministers not using the powers provided by the Civil Contingencies Act to proactively monitor the true state of preparedness across the country?”

The New Transnational Class War

This is a good question, because the bulk of Western government preparation for ‘civil contingencies’ has focused overwhelmingly on centralisation and consolidation of state military and police powers. Why is this? For an idea of the kind of hopelessly regressive thinking that takes place at defence establishment level, a few excerpts from this choice Ministry of Defence report from 2007 are worth contemplating. The report, drawn-up by planners at the MoD’s Defence Concepts and Doctrines Centre – a supposedly advanced military think-tank which plans for future trends – points out that by 2035, world population is likely to grow to 8.5 billion, with less developed countries accounting for 98 per cent of this growth. The report acknowledges that this massive population growth will occur in the context of massive global stress related to simultaneous environmental, energy and economic crises.

Intriguingly, the report focuses on a “youth bulge”, with some 87 per cent of people under the age of 25 inhabiting the less developed South. In particular, it notes that the population of the Middle East will increase by 132 per cent, and of sub-Saharan Africa by 81 per cent. These are predominantly Muslim regions. Hence the report warns of a danger that escalating global crises will fuel a rise in Muslim militancy: “The expectations of growing numbers of young people [in these regions] many of whom will be confronted by the prospect of endemic unemployment… are unlikely to be met.” Growing resentment among the rising numbers of young people in these regions toward their undemocratic regimes will be channelled through “political militancy, including radical political Islam whose concept of Umma, the global Islamic community, and resistance to capitalism may lie uneasily in an international system based on nation-states and global market forces.” But the report doesn’t stop there. It goes further in pointing out a danger of radicalization not only in the South, but also in the North, and warns of a global middle class revolution: “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx.” This could occur on a transnational scale, due to an increasing global divide between a super-rich elite and the middle classes, as well as the rise of an urban underclass, in which case: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.” Curiously prescient – if a little off in terms of dates (24 years off, to be precise).

Let’s take a step back for a moment and reflect on this extraordinary document. It not only problematises population growth amongst particular religious and ethnic groups – it demonises all forms of potential resistance to prevailing global political economic structures across racial, national and class lines. And it does this because it is symptom-oriented – it offers a reactionary militarised response to certain surface symptoms rather than root structural causes related to the organisation of the global system.

The End of History is Nigh

The subliminal, unstated ideological assumption of this sort of analysis is simply this: the current global political economic order must be sustained, maintained, perpetuated at any cost; it cannot be permitted to undergo deep-seated structural reforms, because it is already perfect – we have already arrived at Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, the “unabashed victory of political and economic liberalism” in the West, and “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”, discounting all possibility of alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. Therefore, resistance against the neoliberal system is illegitimate, and deserves to be crushed without remorse.

But Fukuyama was dead wrong. We are currently facing not simply one crisis, but a converging multiplicity of global crises – the global financial crisis, the global water crisis, the global food crisis, the crises of terror, war & militarisation – each of which is merely an interconnected symptom of a deeper Crisis of Civilization. Even the International Energy Agency now warns that we have a maximum of five years before we enter an unpredictable era of dangerous, irreversible climate change heading toward an uninhabitable planet, driven by a global industrial machine which privileges unlimited economic growth for the benefit of a tiny elite minority, against the needs of the vast majority of the human population.

The Arab Spring in the Middle East and the Occupy Movement across the West are, in this context, populist outbursts of resistance against planetary-level human suicide; the beginnings of the death-throes of an overarching civilizational form that is simply not working. The very nature of our civilization – given its accelerating trajectory toward ecological and economic self-destruction – is now in question; its ideology of nature and life, its value system, and how these are inherently linked to its socio-political, economic and cultural forms.

Yet what we are facing is not simply a process of civilizational collapse, but more fundamentally, a process of civilizational transition, the outcome of which remains to be seen. For the first time in human history, we face a civilizational crisis of truly planetary proportions. With it we are witnessing the self-destruction and decline of an exploitative, regressive and harmful industrial civilizational form within the next few decades, and certainly well within this century. With all this, we have an unprecedented historic opportunity, as this regressive civilizational form undergoes its protracted collapse, to push for alternative ways of living, doing and being – economically, politically, culturally, ethically, even spiritually – which are potentially far more conducive to human prosperity and well-being than hitherto imaginable.

That can only be done if we galvanise the energy and excitement of the Occupy Movement to develop firstly, coherent critical diagnoses of the true nature of the problem; and on that basis, coherent alternative frameworks of action. We need to work concertedly to demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of alternative social, political, economic, cultural, and ethical models of life. Not only do we need to develop our thinking and action on this, we need to develop innovative ways to show-case these ideas, to popularise them, and to educate communities and institutions. Most critically, we need to explore how communities, particularly those who are most marginalised and disenfranchised, can act on these models now, to begin creating real change at the grassroots, from the ground up. How can we work together to develop more participatory forms of economic exchange? How can we pool local and community resources to become more resilient to energy shocks – by becoming more self-sufficient in decentralized renewable energy production? How can we learn new skills so that we can grow our own food and be less dependent on the unequal and temperamental international networks of industrial agribusiness? How can we build new community-level political and cultural structures that render top-down state-military structures increasingly irrelevant?

Taking to the streets and occupying public spaces are important seeds of direct action, but from them should blossom the models of social transformation and empowerment that the 99 per cent can begin exploring, in open dialogue with one another, and even with the 1 per cent whose monopolies we are protesting. For it is imperative to ensure that these popular energies develop accurate diagnoses of our predicament, so that our activism can be pointed in the right direction – not just at the 1 per cent, but at the wider political, economic, ideological and ethical system which enables their very existence, and which thus empowers the dysfunctional pathway on which we’re currently heading.

Check out our new film, based on my latest book: The Crisis of Civilization

Burning Britain: Riot Fever as a Symptom of Systemic Failure

2011-08-09T16:25:00.004Z

Warzone

The rioting, looting and plunder that started in Tottenham on Saturday has now spread like wildfire throughout the capital. Shops were broken into, properties vandalized, and flats and vehicles set alight by gangs of mostly young men in Croydon, Clapham, Brixton, Hackney, Camden, Lewisham, Peckham, Newham, East Ham, Ilford, Enfield, Woolwich, Ealing, and Colliers Wood. Trouble was also reported in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, and Nottingham.

Described by witnesses as a ‘warzone’, these are the worst riots to hit London in decades. Over the next few nights, groups of young men, some armed with make-shift weapons and petrol bombs, overwhelmed suburban areas in what was essentially a spontaneous ransacking spree. The chaos has disrupted the lives of thousands of people, rendering them homeless, destroying their businesses, and endangering their livelihoods.

On Monday, at about 4pm, I was talking on the phone to my friend Muddassar Ahmed, CEO of Unitas Communications, while he was driving about town in East Ham where he lives. We were chatting about our plans for a meal round his place to celebrate Ramadan. Suddenly, he said, “Oh my God. There’s a group of, like, 50 young guys and they’re running straight towards me!” Fortunately they ran passed his car, but they continued onto Ilford Lane, which they’d barricaded using crates and boxes.

On Tuesday morning, my dad and stepmother who live in Croydon, where some of the worst violence occurred, told me over the phone how they’d watched as the previous night a gang of about 20 lads smashed their way into the Staples opposite their house and emptied almost the entire superstore. Indeed, many of the images of the carnage captured by journalists have also been revealing – apart from the stealing of expensive luxury items like flat screen televisions and hi-fi systems, a lot of the pillaging has focused on clothes and food.

Police Brutality

So it would be gravely mistaken to assume that the rioting and violence erupting throughout London was motivated fundamentally by opposing police brutality exemplified in the killing of Mark Duggan. Police brutality almost certainly played a role in sparking the initial rage. Early inaccurate media reports claimed that Duggan had fired first at the SO19 police officers who were tracking him, and that the officer who was hit was only saved by the bullet lodging itself in his radio. Forensic analysis later confirmed that the bullet was in fact police-issued, throwing doubt on the whole story.

Semone Wilson, Duggan’s girlfriend, said: “I spoke to him at about 5pm and he asked me if I’d cook dinner. He said he spotted a police car following him. By 6.15 he had been gunned down. I kept phoning and phoning to find out where he was. He wasn’t answering. I rushed down to where it happened. They let me through the police lines but they wouldn’t let me see his body.”

According to eyewitnesses, Duggan had been disabled by police and was lying on the ground when he had been shot. “About three or four police officers had both men pinned on the ground at gunpoint”, said one who was at the scene. “They were really big guns and then I heard four loud shots. The police shot him on the floor.”

Pending further disclosure, the jury is still out on what exactly happened, but at the moment the available evidence does not lend confidence to the original version of events put out by anonymous police sources.

To add insult to injury (or this case, murder), when a 16-year old girl amongst the protestors who had gathered in Tottenham on Saturday approached the police to ask questions, the officers “set upon her with batons”, according to one resident interviewed by the BBC.

Confusing the Issues

Then the fires started. What began as a peaceful but angry demonstration against Duggan’s killing by members of Tottenham’s local community was quickly overrun and overtaken by hundreds of youths, who exploited the circumstances to cause havoc and loot local businesses. The scale of the violence on Saturday alone, and the inability of police and emergency services to respond and contain it effectively, was instrumental in inspiring youths all over London’s suburbs to mimic the violence and, quite literally, use the opportunity to take what they wanted.

Unfortunately, some activists have been confused by these events. Jodi McIntyre described the riots as an “uprising”, and suggested it should “continue in an effective manner” with better “organisation” – “Random looting”, he explained, “is not going to overcome police injustice. But until then, the language of the unheard will continue to be spoken.” But to what end should such admittedly pointless random looting therefore continue? How does exhorting its continuation in any way fit into a genuinely progressives agenda for the inclusive, community-led, radical systemic transformation necessary to overcome our converging social, political, economic and cultural crises?

Responding to criticism for expressing support for the riots, McIntyre wrote: “If it is a question of where my solidarity lies, and the options are M&S and Footlocker versus young people in the streets, then there is only one answer.” To be fair McIntyre expressed “sympathy” for those who had their “homes or cornershops damaged” and noted he has never supporting looting or arson – but ultimately, his comments illustrate a serious lack of understanding of what had happened.

There is no binary moral choice between support for the ‘corporate establishment’ and ‘young people’ – as if the riots somehow manifest young people challenging corporate power in a genuinely progressive way. The riots, the looting, the plunder, did not in any way constitute an “uprising” against corporate or even state power. On the contrary, the violence represented the most regressive manifestations of corporate and state inculcated values of crude materialist, market-driven hedonism. The looters and vandals were not politically-motivated, let alone progressively-inspired. On the contrary, what precisely illustrates the entirely self-destructive nature of this phenomenon is that its main victims were not the government, nor large corporates shielded by the promise of insurance pay-outs – but simply ordinary working people. If this was an uprising, it ended up targeting the very communities from which these young people came, even if these are communities from which they feel ostracized.

Boiling Point

McIntyre is right about one thing, though, when he says, “Inequality is at the heart of this.” Indeed, the violence is a disturbing symptom of the protracted collapse-process which industrial civilization now finds itself in.

The vast majority of perpetrators were young people, both men and women although mostly men. Young people in Britain have been hit hardest by the impact of recession. Unemployment in the UK is now at a staggering 2.49 million, having risen steadily over the last decade – increasingly so since the 2008 crash – with 1.46 million claiming jobseekers allowance. Across the country, one in five 16-24 year olds – just under a million young people – are unemployed.

Figures released just this summer showed that the economic gloom was deepening particularly across the capital, with 20 people chasing each available job in 22 of London’s 73 parliamentary constituencies. In other areas, such as Peckham and Hackney which were also sites of major rioting, the number of people going after each job is over 40. And in almost every seat, this measure has worsened in the last few months.

It won’t get better soon – this year will see unemployment rise to 2.7 million. And young people will face the brunt of it, as they already have. In the quarter to May 2011, the employment rate of working age men in London was lower than the national average, and underwent a “dramatic fall of 0.9 percentage points, while the national rate remained the same.” Almost a quarter of working-age Londoners are economically inactive – 1.3 million people, and of these 397,000 people are aged 16 and over.

And there is an unmistakable race-dimension to class inequality. Black and ethnic minority (BME) groups face the brunt of the impact of economic crisis. Across the UK, BME groups have the highest rates of income-poverty, and in London, more than half of people living in low-income households are from ethnic minorities. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 70 per cent of those in income poverty in inner London are from minority ethnic groups, as are 50 per cent in outer London.

There is an interplay between the wider racial contours of social inequalities and institutional police racism. Despite commendable progress in significant areas, black people are still seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than white. Asians are twice as likely to be stopped and searched as white people. More than 30 per cent of all black males living in Britain are on the national DNA database, compared with about 10 per cent of white males and 10 per cent of Asian males. Black men are about four times more likely than white men to have their DNA profiles stored on the DNA database.

Meanwhile, the British government’s flagship ‘Big Society’-inspired policy to support young people amounts to nothing less than ruthlessly slashing youth services, and hoping the ‘market’ – which of course brought us into this economic mess – will magically take care of them. “One in four of England’s youth services face catastrophic cuts of between 21-30 per cent – three times higher than the general level of council cuts”, reports Kerry Jenkins, operations officer of Unite the Unions – a merger between two of Britain’s leading Unions, the T&G and Amicus. “Many authorities intend to get rid of their youth services completely, while 80% of voluntary organisations providing services for young people have said programmes will be cut. Local authority chiefs predict that youth service budgets will be slashed by £100 million, leading to the loss of 3,000 full-time youth worker jobs.”

Indeed, the government was warned. Less than a year ago, Sir Paul Ennals, Head of the National Children’s Bureau, predicted that the combination of unemployment and cuts to services would lead to young people becoming “progressively disengaged from their own communities in a way that we are seeing in France”, which has already seen riots and social unrest “driven by young people who are alienated from their community.”

And as late as 2^nd August – less than a week before the riots – criminologist Professor John Pitts, an advisor to several local authorities on violent crime and youth culture, warned that government cuts would lead to an increase in violent crime this summer.

The Failure of Neoliberal Capitalism

The unprecedented economic crisis, linked to the global political economy’s fundamental breaching of ecological and energy limits, has already generated outbreaks of civil disorder all over the world in different regional and socio-political contexts. In the Middle East, we have seen the Arab spring, triggered by rocketing food prices, driven by a combination of environmental, financial and energy factors. In Europe, we have seen protests and rioting in Greece, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Turkey and France, fuelled by the devastating impact of the global recession. It is only a matter of time before these crisis-conditions catch-up with the United States mainland.

In the UK, converging energy, economic and environmental crises are being refracted through the lens of a deeply unequal, yet vehemently consumerist, society. As Professor Pitts argued in a later interview directly about the riots: “Many of the people involved are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future.” Widening social exclusion has pushed these young people onto the margins of conventional morality – “Those things that normally constrain people are not there. Much of this was opportunism but in the middle of it there is a social question to be asked about young people with nothing to lose.” Entrenched structural inequalities thus generate a sense of justification for looting: “They feel they can rationalise it by targeting big corporations. There is a sense that the companies have lots of money, while they have very little.” Simultaneously, the rioting and violence lacked any progressive content whatsoever – driven by conventional neoliberal values of excessive consumerism, most looters used the opportunity not to challenge capitalism, but to indulge manically in its most materialistic values by simply stealing the items they could not normally afford: “Where we used to be defined by what we did, now we are defined by what we buy. These big stores are in the business of tempting [the consumer] and then suddenly these people find they can just walk into the shop and have it all.”

The young people involved in this spate of violence are beyond the conventional alienation of repressed labour. Instead, they suffer from a deeper, more dangerous alienation of being utterly surplus to capitalist requirements, irrelevant and ostracized, and thus doomed to subsist on the margins, functionally illiterate, without hope or aspiration. That is a mode of being which is no longer capable of recognizing ethical constraints or boundaries, precisely because the state has already breached its contract of citizenship to them. The shooting of Mark Duggan, and the underbelly of class and race inequality it followed, was merely a match to a flame that has already burned for too long.

However the government chooses to now respond to the escalating violence, there can be no doubt that the episode represents a fundamental turning-point for British society, in a world that has already passed the tipping point on a whole range of interconnected systemic crises. The danger is that the authorities will offer the traditional, knee-jerk, business-as-usual response of maximizing police state powers, rather than addressing the root causes of our predicament. Of course, robust measures are clearly necessary to contain the violence and hold those responsible accountable. But we are already on the slippery slope of intensifying state-militarization – and we won’t be able to get off as long as we refuse, as societies, to take responsibility for the systemic crises we all now face.

When Innocence is Not Enough: Talha Ahsan and the Rise of the (In)Security State

2011-07-10T17:00:00.004Z

Published in Ceasefire Magazine

Three days ago was the six year anniversary of the London bombings. The anniversary passed relatively quietly – except for the appalling revelation that News of the World journalists had hacked into the phones of relatives of the 7/7 victims. Curiously, Scotland Yard seemed to have known about the hacking long ago, according to Graham Foulkes, whose son David was killed in the attacks. Further revelations that up to five Metropolitan Police officers had received bribes totalling £100,000 from the paper underscored the extent to which police corruption had facilitated the scandal

Ten days from now comes another anniversary – much less well-known, but nevertheless worthy of our attention – the five year anniversary of the detention without trial of a young British Muslim, Talha Ahsan. I first learned about Talha’s case around 2007, when I went to pick up my father and stepmother from their friend’s house in South London. It was late Friday evening, but I’d managed to find parking near the house.

When the front door opened, I was greeted by a mild-mannered elderly gentleman, Mr. Ahsan. He led me upstairs to where my dad was already seated with his wife, and I was offered tea and a delectable assortment of Indian sweets by Mrs. Ahsan. My dad introduced me as an author and mentioned my then-new book, The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth, 2006), in which I had challenged the British government’s account of its policies before and after the 7/7 terrorist atrocities. The topic immediately struck the interest of our host, and I quickly learned all about what had happened to their son Talha.

Read the rest at Ceasefire...

Water, Oil and Demographics: The Middle East Triple Crisis

2011-02-16T11:37:00.002Z

Originally published at Europe's World policy journal

Unless Arab governments invest much more in health, education and citizens' rights, warnsNafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, the pressures of water scarcity, oil depletion and population growth will spell their downfalls

One in five people around the world lack access to safe drinking water, so it is undeniable that we already face a global water crisis. But water scarcity is not just about its physical availability, it is also about power, poverty and inequality. Japan and Cambodia, for instance, experience about the same average rainfall of 160cm per year – yet while the average Japanese consumes nearly 400 litres per day, the average Cambodian uses only about a tenth of this.

As it is, the converging effects of population growth, climate change and energy depletion look set to make the physical scarcity of water a greater problem than ever. The Middle East and North Africa are particularly vulnerable, accounting as they do for 6.3% of the world’s population but only 1.4% of its renewable fresh water. And three-quarters of the region’s available fresh water is in just four countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Twelve of the 15 most water-scarce nations in the world – with an average of less than 1,000 cubic metres of fresh water per person per year – are also to be found in this region, namely Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Israel and Palestine. And in eight of these countries, available fresh water is less than 250 cubic metres.

Water consumption in the region is linked overwhelmingly to industrial agriculture. From 1965 to 1997, Arab population growth drove demand for agricultural development, leading to a doubling of land under irrigation. In countries with less agriculture or industry, like Kuwait, water is largely used for domestic purposes.

But demographic expansion in all these countries is set to dramatically worsen their predicament. Although birth rates are falling, a third of the overall population is below 15 years old, and large numbers of young women either are or soon will be reaching reproductive age. The Ministry of Defence in the UK has projected that by 2030 the population of the Middle East will have increased by 132%, and that of sub-Saharan Africa by 81%, generating an unprecedented “youth bulge.”

The Water Sector Assessment Report on the Gulf countries expects that the availability of fresh water is likely to halve because of these demographic pressures, and the risk is that this will exacerbate the danger of inter-state conflicts over declining freshwater supplies. Competition to control water has already played a key role in the region's geopolitical tensions, for instance, between Turkey and Syria; Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority; Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia; as well as Saudi Arabia and its neighbours, Qatar, Bahrain, and Jordan. A halving of available water supplies due to population growth over the next 20 years could all too easily intensify these tensions and turn them into open military hostilities.

A recent study by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) suggests that water scarcity would also trigger social unrest within national borders, because of water’s important cultural and symbolic function in underpinning the social contract in the Arab world. Underground water supplies are being heavily depleted by their use in irrigating deserts, a situation which could exhaust them completely as local populations double or more in size. While economic growth, accompanied by greater urbanisation, migration to urban areas, and higher per capita incomes has been translated into greater demand for freshwater, the population movements that have resulted are now exacerbating local ethnic tensions.

“If the water goes away, then suddenly the whole deal that holds the government together goes away”, warns John Alterman, the CSIS Middle East director. He adds that this could undermine state legitimacy, radicalise ‘identity politics’ and lead to civil disorder and even state-failure. “It is a fundamental problem", he says, "for these governments and the people who live under them.”

Climate change and energy depletion are likely to further amplify these dangers. Many of the region’s irrigation systems are already under environmental strain because of salinity or over-exploitation of groundwater. From 1974 to 2004, the Arab world experienced rises in surface air temperature ranging from 0.2C to 2C, and forecasting models generally project a hotter, drier, less predictable climate that could produce a 20-30% drop in water run-off in the region by 2050, mainly due to rising temperatures and lower precipitation.

As early as 2015, the average Arab will be forced to survive on less than 500 cubic metres of water a year, a level defined as severe scarcity. Shifts in rainfall patterns will certainly affect crops, particularly rice. A "business-as-usual model" for climate change suggests global average temperatures could rise by 4°C by mid-century, and this would devastate agriculture in the Middle East and North Africa, with crop yields perhaps falling by 23-35% with weak carbon fertilisation, or 15-20% with strong carbon fertilisation.

The worldwide cost of infrastructural development capable of responding to the intensifying water crisis could amount to trillions of dollars, and even then the creation of this new infrastructure would itself be energy intensive and would therefore only mitigate the impact of scarcity on richer countries.

Hydrocarbon energy depletion is due to complicate matters even more. In its latest "World Energy Outlook" for 2010 the International Energy Agency (IEA) argued that conventional oil production worldwide most probably peaked in 2006, and is now progressively declining. This conclusion certainly fits the latest production data, which shows that world oil production, has been undulating but gradually declining since around 2005. Yet the IEA also argued that the shortfall will be made up from greater exploitation of unconventional oil and gas sources, albeit at far higher prices because of the greater environmental, energy and extraction costs.

The bad news is that the IEA’s optimism about unconventional sources could be fundamentally misplaced. The six biggest Middle East oil producing countries officially hold around 74bn barrels (Gbs) of proven oil reserves between them. But British geologist Euan Mearns of Aberdeen University notes that published reserve data puts the most likely size of these reserves at only around 350 Gbs. And the UK government’s former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, found in a study for Energy Policy that official world oil reserves had been overstated by up to a third – implying that we are on the verge of a major ‘tipping point’ in oil production. Other studies by Sweden's Uppsala University, Reading and Newcastle Universities in the UK and Boston University in the U.S. suggest that the energy return on energy invested (EROI) of unconventional oil and gas sources, even accounting for technological advances, will be too small to mitigate peak oil.

All this means not only that the era of cheap oil is over, but that within the next decade or so major oil producing countries will increasingly struggle against costly, below-ground geological constraints.

If that proves to be the case, then by 2020, perhaps as early as 2015, the contribution of Middle East oil to world energy consumption could become negligible. That in turn would mean a catastrophic loss of state revenues for what are now the major Arab oil producing countries, rendering them highly vulnerable to the converging impacts of existing water shortages, rapid demographic expansion, climate change induced-droughts and declining crop yields.

This worst-case scenario is not inevitable, but there is only a very short window of opportunity for policies to change the situation. Revising water conservation, management and distribution efforts that have been neglected can reduce water consumption and increase efficiency, but these need to be combined with radical efforts to speed the transition away from oil dependence to a zero-carbon renewable energy infrastructure. Furthermore, concerted investments in health, education and citizens' rights, especially for women, are the key tools for alleviating population growth in the region, and unless Arab governments pursue these policy measures urgently they are unlikely to survive beyond the first quarter of this century.

Diversity Does Not Breed Terrorism - Cameron's Multicultural War (Unabridged Version)

2011-02-06T19:29:00.004Z

This is the original, unabridged version of my oped published today by the Independent on Sunday

Cameron’s recognition that we should acknowledge the dangers of extremist ideology, and the need to tackle it head-on, is welcome. His call for a social vision that young British Muslims can feel part of, to overcome the sense of rootlessness which can make a minority of them vulnerable to extremist recruitment, makes eminent sense. And his condemnation of the divisive impact of segregated communities, along with state support for groups with backward ideas about women and society, is certainly important – though hardly groundbreaking.

The devil, unfortunately, is in the details. By pinpointing the root cause of terrorism as an amorphous “state multiculturalism”, Cameron reveals that his government’s understanding of the problem is as simplistic as his predecessors.

The actual background of those already convicted on terrorism charges undermines his suggestion that the government should attempt to crack-down on 'non-violent extremists' – an undefined category that could include anyone from climate protestors, to student dissidents, to civil liberties campaigners. Over a third of terrorism convictions between 1999 and 2009, and every single major terrorist plot in the UK including 7/7, were linked to the extremist network formerly known as al-Muhajiroun. Yet despite being proscribed, the network has never been fully investigated by police. Many of its leaders roam free despite a track record of flagrantly inciting to violence, while its spiritual leader, Omar Bakri Mohammed, was allowed to escape to Beirut despite confessing to having advanced warning of al-Qaeda plans to bomb London. Worse, the court records of the fertilizer bomb plot trial showed that another individual Mohammed Quayyum Khan, also known as ‘Q’, was an al-Qaeda ‘go-between’ who recruited the leaders of that plot and the 7/7 mission – yet inexplicably remains at large.

As former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus has noted, the fact that al-Muhajiroun had disturbing links with British security services in the Balkans during the late 1990s, as well as with repressive Western client-regimes abroad such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, among others, may well explain this reticence. Our links with militant Islamists during this period was motivated by the desire to use them to access strategic oil supplies in Central Asia and elsewhere, according to whistleblowers like former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds – whose testimony before the 9/11 Commission and U.S. Congress is so embarrassing for the U.S.-led ‘War on Terror’ it has been retroactively classified.

These links are compounded by an interventionist foreign policy programme that has been heavily disfigured under the influence of short-sighted (and self-interested) U.S. geostrategy in the Muslim world. As both internal Home Office and Joint Intelligence Committee reports have conceded, Britain’s unquestioning allegiance to U.S. hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East and Central Asia has been counterproductive. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance, the radicalization of the insurgency has accelerated in direct proportion to NATO’s troop surge, and ceaseless civilian casualties from indiscriminate U.S. airstrikes have inflamed local grievances, while failing utterly to meet even the most elementary requirements of the national interest.

Our U.S.-hijacked foreign policy has also poured fuel on the fire for extremist recruiters at home, who point to our interventionism abroad as ample evidence of an anti-Muslim agenda; which is then made worse by domestic policies that reinforce the structural problems prevailing in many British Muslim communities.

For instance, Cameron overlooks how government policies have intensified British Muslim social exclusion. The dogmatic adherence to neoliberal principles pursued by both Tory and Labour governments, continuing under the coalition regime, have widened inequalities in the UK with debilitating consequences for the working class from both white and ethnic minority communities. Consequently 69 per cent of British Muslims of South Asian background live in poverty, compared to 20 per cent of white people. Meanwhile, questionable and sometimes institutionally racist local authority housing policies have systematically housed white and ethnic minority communities in segregated areas of the same cities. The upshot is that Muslims in Britain are now overrepresented in poor housing, unemployment, low educational achievement, and in prisons.

But Cameron has already been warned that his own economic policies will make this sense of exclusion even worse. As was revealed by equalities secretary Theresa May’s letter of June last year to Chancellor George Osborne, senior ministers are well aware that the coalition’s cuts would likely widen social inequalities, such that “women, ethnic minorities, disabled people and older people will be disproportionately affected.”

Of course, poverty by itself does not cause extremism, but on this scale feeds the sense of a separate identity. Crucially, this even afflicts more upwardly-mobile groups who often remain painfully aware of the unresolved problems in their wider communities. This was revealed in the path-breaking research of Quintan Wiktorowicz – now the White House senior director for global engagement at the U.S. National Security Council. Even more surprisingly, Professor Wiktorowicz, a former academic and author of the book Radical Islam Rising, found from his hundreds of interviews with British Islamists – many linked to al-Muhajiroun – that religious identity is not the root cause of violent radicalization. On the contrary, while very religious Muslims were the most resistant to radicalization, he found that those who did not have a strong grounding in Islam were most at risk of being attracted by Islamist extremism.

Perhaps even more counter-intuitively, despite entrenched social exclusion, studies show that British Muslim communities are largely integrated into British social and cultural life. A 2009 Gallup poll found that while only half the general British population identifies strongly as British, 77 per cent of Muslims in the UK identify very strongly as British, with 82 per cent affirming themselves as loyal to Britain. Although employment levels for British Muslims are at only 38 per cent, British Muslims have a higher confidence in the judiciary than the general public, and 67 per cent of them want to live in a neighbourhood that has a mix of ethnic and religious people – compared to 58 per cent of the general British public

The danger is that by blaming “state multiculturalism”, Cameron is not simply barking up the wrong tree, but undermining the good-will on both sides of the fence. As economic inequalities deepen under the impact of the coalition’s ill-conceived economic prescriptions, social cohesion will be challenged. Meanwhile, his speech will be exploited both by militant Muslims to vindicate their claims that the state is the avowed enemy of Islam, and by far-right extremists to legitimize their vendetta against minority and Muslim communities. Rather than dealing with the root causes of terrorism, this only makes our predicament far more volatile.

By blaming our longstanding celebration of diversity – a uniquely British value that stands us out from our European neighbours – Cameron is targeting precisely the principles that make our country strong. If he really wants to deal with the scourge of Islamist extremism, he would do well to focus on encouraging the authorities to investigate and prosecute individuals linked to groups like al-Muhajiroun who remain at large despite breaking the law; on re-evaluating a U.S.-centric foreign policy that has empowered Islamists abroad who support extremists at home in the name of oil and geopolitics; and on addressing the social problems that working class communities of all ethnic and religious backgrounds are experiencing due to the bankrupt economic policies of successive British governments.

The Great Unravelling: Tunisia, Egypt and the Protracted Collapse of the American Empire

2011-02-01T17:23:00.003Z

As first published at The Learning Machine

The toppling of dictator Ben Ali in Tunisia in the wake of mass protests and bloody street clashes has been widely recognized as signifying a major transformation in the future of politics and geopolitics for the major countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). There is little doubt that the Tunisian experience triggered the escalation of unprecedented protests in Egypt against the Mubarak regime. The question on every media pundit’s lips is, ‘Will events in Tunisia and Egypt have a domino effect throughout the Arab world?’

The potential fall of Hosni Mubarak is serious stuff. As The Economist points out, Egypt is “the most populous country in the Arab world”, viewed by the U.S., Britain and West as “a strategic pivot” and a “a vital ally” in the ‘War on Terror’. No wonder then that activists across the world are holding their breath in anticipation that one of the world’s most notorious dictators, and one of the West’s most favoured client-regimes, might be overthrown.

What is happening in Tunisia and Egypt, however, is only a manifestation of a deeper convergence of fundamental structural crises which are truly global in scale. The eruption of social and political unrest has followed the impact of deepening economic turbulence across the region, due to the inflationary impact of rocketing fuel and food prices. As of mid-January, even before Ben Ali had fled Tunis, riots were breaking out in Algeria, Morocco, Yemen and Jordan – the key grievances? Rampant unemployment, unaffordable food and consumer goods, endemic poverty, lack of basic services, and political repression.

Global Food Crisis: 2011

In many of these countries, certainly in both Tunisia and Egypt, tensions have simmered for years. The trigger, it seems, came in the form of food shortages caused by the record high global prices reported by the FAO in December 2010. The return of high food prices two to three years after the 2008 global food crisis should not be a surprise. For most of the preceding decade, world grain consumption exceeded production – correlating with agricultural land productivity declining almost by half from 1990-2007, compared to 1950-1990.

This year, global food supply chains were again “stretched to the limit” following poor harvests in Canada, Russia and Ukraine; hotter, drier weather in South America cutting soybean production; flooding in Australia, wiping out its wheat crops; not to mention the colder, stormier, snowier winters experienced in the northern hemisphere, damaging harvests.

Climate Change

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.

But climate change is likely to do more than generate droughts in some regions. It is also linked to the prospect of colder weather in the eastern US, east Asia and northern Europe – as the rate of Arctic summer sea-ice is accelerating, leading to intensifying warming, the change in atmospheric pressure pushes cold Arctic air to the south. Similarly, even the floods in Australia could be linked to climate change. Scientists agree they were caused by a particularly strong El-Nino/La-Nina oscillation in the Tropical Pacific ocean-atmospheric system. But Michael McPhaden, co-author of a recent scientific study on the issue, suggests that recently stronger El-Ninos are “plausibly the result of global warming.”

Energy Depletion

The global food situation has been compounded by the over-dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, consuming ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food energy produced. The problem is that global conventional oil production has most likely already peaked, having been on an undulating plateau since 2005 – and forecast to steadily and inexorably decline, leading to higher prices. Although oil prices dropped after the 2008 crash due to recession, the resuscitation of economic activity has pushed up demand, leading fuel prices to creep back up to $95 a barrel.

The fuel price hikes, combining with the predatory activities of financial speculators trying to rake-in profits by investing in the commodity markets, have underpinned worldwide inflation. Just as in 2008, the worst effected have been the poorer populations of the South. Thus, the eruption of political unrest in Egypt and elsewhere cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the context of accelerating ecological, energy and economic crises – inherently interconnected problems which are symptomatic of an Empire in overstretch, a global political economy in breach of the natural limits of its environment.

Post-Peak Egypt

Indeed, Egypt is particularly vulnerable. Its 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. 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.

Due to such vulnerabilities, Egypt, as with many of the MENA countries, now lies on the fault-lines of the convergence of global ecological, energy and economic crises – and thus, on the frontlines of deepening global system failure. The Empire is crumbling. The guarded official statements put out by the Obama administration only illustrate the disingenuous impotence of the U.S. position.

Imperial Surrogate

While Vice-President Joe Biden insisted that Mubarak is not a dictator, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama lamely condemned “violence” and voiced moral support for the right to protest. The slightly muted response is understandable. For the last 30 years, the U.S. has supported Mubarak’s brutal reign with economic and military assistance – currently providing $1.3 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing (FMF). The U.S. Congressional Research Service reports that additionally:

“Egypt benefits from certain aid provisions that are available to only a few other countries. Since 2000, Egypt’s FMF funds have been deposited in an interest bearing account in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and have remained there until they are obligated... Egypt is allowed to set aside FMF funds for current year payments only, rather than set aside the full amount needed to meet the full cost of multi-year purchases. Cash flow financing allows Egypt to negotiate major arms purchases with U.S. defense suppliers.”

The U.S. also happens to be Egypt’s largest bilateral trading partner. It is “one of the largest single markets worldwide for American wheat and corn and is a significant importer of other agricultural commodities, machinery, and equipment.” The U.S. is also the second largest foreign investor in the country, “primarily in the oil and gas sector.”

Perhaps Biden’s denial of Mubarak’s dictatorial qualities are not that difficult to understand. Since the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981, Egypt has officially been in a continuous “state of emergency,” which under a 1958 law permits Mubarak to oversee measures unnervingly similar to the USA Patriot Act – indefinite detention; torture; secret courts; special authority for police interventions; complete absence of privacy; and so on, ad nauseum. Not to mention the fact that inequality in the U.S. is actually higher than in Egypt.

Friends of the Family

Yet ultimately, the U.S. administration cannot absolve itself. Successive State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for Egypt, while still conservative, catalogue the litany of routine police-state repression inflicted on the civilian population over the last decade by Mubarak’s security forces. When asked about the shocking findings of the 2009 report, Clinton herself downplayed the implications, describing Mubarak and his wife as “friends of my family.” So it is not that we do not know. It is that we did not care until the terror became so unbearable, that it exploded onto the streets of Cairo.

Egypt is central among a network of repressive Arab regimes which the British and Americans have actively supported since the early twentieth century to sustain control of cheap oil “at all costs”, as Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd noted in 1956, as well as to protect Israel. Declassified British Foreign Office files reviewed by historian Mark Curtis show that the Gulf sheikhdoms were largely created by Britain to “retain our influence,” while police and military assistance would help “counter hostile influence and propaganda within the countries themselves” – particularly from “ultra-nationalist maladies”. The real danger, warned the Foreign Office in 1957, was of dictators “losing their authority to reformist or revolutionary movements which might reject the connexion with the United Kingdom.”

Protracted Collapse

No wonder then that the chief fear of Western intelligence agencies and corporate risk consultants is not that mass resistance might fail to generate vibrant and viable democracies, but simply the prospect of a regional “contagion” that could destabilize “Saudi oil fields.” Such conventional analyses, of course, entirely miss the point: The American Empire, and the global political economy it has spawned, is unravelling – not because of some far-flung external danger, but under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It is unsustainable – already in overshoot of the earth’s natural systems, exhausting its own resource base, alienating the vast majority of the human and planetary population.

The solution in Tunisia, in Egypt, in the entire Middle East, and beyond, does not lay merely in aspirations for democracy. Hope can only spring from a fundamental re-evaluation of the entire structure of our civilization in its current form. If we do not use the opportunities presented by these crises to push for fundamental structural change, then the “contagion” will engulf us all.

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. He is author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), which inspired the forthcoming documentary film, The Crisis of Civilization (2011).

Radio Ecoshock Interview

2011-01-28T22:06:00.002Z

My interview with Radio Ecoshock, the web's premiere ecologically-oriented radio show, about my new book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010). Listen to it here - my bit starts around 30 min in.

My new book makes the Guardian's 'non-fiction choice'

2011-01-04T12:09:00.004Z

On New Year's Day I was pleasantly surprised to find that A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It was given a pretty positive, if short, review by Steven Poole in the Guardian, alongside two other books, which you can read here. Here's the excerpt about mine (some of it might not entirely make sense without reading the other reviews):

If you still need something to worry about, how about a grand conflagration of climate, financial, energy, food, and civil-liberties crises, which might destroy the world as we know it before the century is out? Such troubles, Ahmed argues, are not blips in our civilisation but "integral to the ideology, structure and logic of the global political economy", which therefore needs to be changed if humanity is to survive.

Ahmed could be charged with a certain ebullience in his delineating of potential catastrophe, which will necessitate "the dawn of a post-carbon civilisation". But his arguments are in the main forceful and well-sourced, with particularly good sections on agribusiness, US policies of "energy security", and what he terms the "securitisation" of ordinary life by western governments. Finally he offers a rather catholic range of recommendations, including treating water and energy as "part of the Global Commons" and eliminating the lending of money at interest. Building more car-parks for philosophers and novelists to frolic in, sadly, doesn't seem to be on the world-saving agenda.

Short and sweet.

Oil or Terrorism: Which Motivates U.S. Policy More?

2010-12-15T16:44:00.003Z

As published by Foreign Policy In Focus (Institute for Policy Studies, Washington D.C.)

Among the batch of classified diplomatic cables recently released by the controversial whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, several have highlighted the vast extent of the financial infrastructure of Islamist terrorism sponsored by key U.S. allies in the ongoing "War on Terror."

One cable by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in December 2009 notes that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” Despite this, “Riyadh has taken only limited action to disrupt fundraising for the UN 1267-listed Taliban and LeT [Lashkar e-Tayyiba] groups that are also aligned with al-Qaeda.”

Clinton raises similar concerns about other states in the Gulf and Central Asia. Kuwait remains reluctant “to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks outside of Kuwait.” The United Arab Emirates is “vulnerable to abuse by terrorist financiers and facilitation networks” due to lack of regulatory oversight. Qatar’s cooperation with U.S. counter-terrorism is the “worst in the region,” and authorities are “hesitant to act against known terrorists.” Pakistani military intelligence officials “continue to maintain ties with a wide array of extremist organizations, in particular the Taliban [and the] LeT.”

Despite such extensive knowledge of these terrorism financing activities, successive U.S. administrations have not only failed to exert military or economic pressure on these countries, but in fact have actively protected them, funnelling billions of dollars of military and economic assistance. The reason is oil.

It's the Hydrocarbons, Stupid

Oil has always been an overwhelming Western interest in the region, beginning with Britain’s discovery of it in Persia in 1908. Britain controlled most Middle East oil until the end of World War II, after which the United States secured its sphere of influence in Saudi Arabia. After some pushback, Britain eventually accepted the United States as the lead player in the region. “US-UK agreement upon the broad, forward-looking pattern for the development and utilisation of petroleum resources under the control of nationals of the two countries is of the highest strategic and commercial importance”, reads a 1945 memo from the chief of the State Department’s Petroleum Division.

Anglo-U.S. geo-strategy exerted this control through alliances with the region’s most authoritarian regimes to ensure a cheap and stable supply of petroleum to Western markets. Recently declassified secret British Foreign Office files from the 1940s and 1950s confirm that the Gulf sheikhdoms were largely created to retain British influence in the Middle East. Britain pledged to protect them from external attack and to “counter hostile influence and propaganda within the countries themselves.” Police and military training would help in “maintaining internal security.” Similarly, in 1958 a U.S. State Department official noted that the Gulf sheikhdoms should be modernized without undermining “the fundamental authority of the ruling groups.”

The protection of some of the world’s most virulent authoritarian regimes thus became integral to maintaining Anglo-U.S. geopolitical control of the world’s strategic hydrocarbon energy reserves. Our governments have willingly paid a high price for this access – the price of national security.

Still Funding Radicalism

One of al-Qaeda’s chief grievances against the West is what Osama bin Laden dubs the “Crusader-Jewish” presence in the lands of Islam, including support for repressive Arab regimes. Under U.S. direction and sponsorship, many of these allies played a central role in financing and supporting bin Laden’s mujahideen networks in Afghanistan to counter Soviet influence. It is perhaps less well understood that elements of the same regimes continued to support bin Laden’s networks long after the Cold War – and that they have frequently done so in collusion with U.S. intelligence services for short-sighted geopolitical interests.

In fact, Afghanistan provides a rather revealing example. From 1994 to 2001, assisted by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the Clinton and Bush II administrations covertly sponsored, flirted and negotiated with the Taliban as a vehicle of regional influence. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, former White House Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan, also testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on South Asia about the “covert policy that has empowered the Taliban,” in the hopes of bringing sufficient stability to “permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan.”

The Great Game is still in full swing. “Since the U.S.-led offensive that ousted the Taliban from power, the project has been revived and drawn strong U.S. support” reported the Associated Press in 2005. “The pipeline would allow formerly Soviet Central Asian nations to export rich energy resources without relying on Russian routes. The project’s main sponsor is the Asian Development Bank” – in which the United States is the largest shareholder alongside Japan. It so happens that the southern section of the proposed pipeline runs through territory still under de facto Taliban control, where NATO war efforts are focused.

Other evidence demonstrates that control of the world’s strategic energy reserves has always been a key factor in the direction of the "War on Terror". For instance, the April 2001 study commissioned by then-Vice President Dick Cheney confirmed official fears of an impending global oil supply crunch, energy shortages, and “the need for military intervention” in the Middle East to maintain stability.

Energy and Iran

Other diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks show clearly that oil now remains central to U.S. policy toward Iran, depicting an administration desperate to “wean the world” off Iran’s oil supply, according to the London Telegraph. With world conventional oil production most likely having peaked around 2006, Iran is one of few major suppliers that can potentially boost oil output by another 3 million barrels, and natural gas output by even more. The nuclear question is not the real issue, but provides ample pretext for isolating Iran.

But the U.S. anti-Iran stance has been highly counterproductive. In a series of dispatches for the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh cited U.S. government and intelligence officials confirming that the CIA and the Pentagon have funnelled millions of dollars via Saudi Arabia to al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni extremist groups across the Middle East and Central Asia. The policy – officially confirmed by a U.S. Presidential Finding in early 2008 – began in 2003 and has spilled over into regions like Iraq and Lebanon, fuelling Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian conflict.

Not only did no Democratic members of the House ever contest the policy but President Obama reappointed the architect of the policy – Robert Gates – as his defence secretary. As former National Security Council staffers Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett observe, Obama’s decision earlier this year to step up covert military operations in North Africa and the Middle East marked an “intensification of America’s covert war against Iran.”

This anti-Iran directive, which extends covert U.S. support for anti-Shi’ite Islamist militant networks linked to al-Qaeda, hardly fits neatly into the stated objectives of the "War on Terror." Unless we recognize that controlling access to energy, not fighting terror, is the primary motive.

Beyond Dependency

While classified covert operations continue to bolster terrorist activity, the Obama administration struggles vainly to deal with the geopolitical fall-out. Getting out of this impasse requires, first, recognition of our over-dependence on hydrocarbon energy sources to the detriment of real national security. Beholden to the industry lobbyists and the geopolitical dominance that control of oil provides, Western governments have supported dictatorial regimes that fuel widespread resentment in the Muslim world. Worse, the West has tolerated and until recently colluded in the sponsorship of al-Qaeda terrorist activity by these regimes precisely to maintain the existing global energy system.

Given the convergence of peak oil and climate change, it is imperative to transition to a new, renewable energy system. Such a transition will mitigate the impact of hydrocarbon energy depletion, help prevent the worst effects of anthropogenic global warming, and contribute to economic stability through infrastructure development and job creation.

By weaning us off our reliance on dubious foreign regimes, a shift to renewables and away from supporting oil dictatorships will also make us safer.

Avoiding Catastrophe

2010-11-24T15:09:00.003Z

Published in today's Independent Editor's choice Blogs

The revelation that carbon dioxide emissions are set to increase this year by over 3 per cent, despite temporarily falling 1.3 per cent between 2008 and 2009 due to global recession, signals an urgent warning that current efforts on climate change have simply failed. Even while we are still in the midst of recession – where the recovery is so fragile that another bank bailout is being pushed through in hopes of preventing a full-blown eurozone crisis – fossil fuel emissions have never been higher, and are projected to accelerate in coming years.

Officially, climate policy targets are aiming to cap emissions at around 450 parts per million (ppm), which would theoretically prevent global average temperatures rising beyond a ‘safe’ 2 degrees Celsius. The first problem is that we are long passed the danger point. In mid-2005, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed that the total atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (accounting for nitrous oxide, methane and so on) was already 455 ppm. This implies that we are already well on course to surpass 2 degrees.

The second problem is that as a growing number of leading climate scientists are now telling us, climate policy targets lag far behind the peer-reviewed science. The IPCC’s and most other conventional climate models used to inform policy, do not sufficiently account for the complex role of uncertainties linked to positive-feedbacks – that is, the capacity of global warming to trigger changes which, in turn, trigger further changes, leading to a self-reinforcing feedback-cycle.

A disturbing body of data indicates that if we stray for too long above 350 ppm, as we are already, we are in grave danger of raising global temperatures by 1C (we are now at 0.8C), triggering exactly such positive-feedbacks with the potential to lead to dramatic, irreversible changes that could possibly culminate in runaway global warming. We don’t even need to get to 2C.

James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warns that if our “present overshoot” of the 350 ppm upper limit “is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.” According to a 2009 paper in Nature co-authored by 28 international climate scientists, these effects would include “the risk of irreversible climate change, such as the loss of major ice sheets, accelerated sea-level rise and abrupt shifts in forest and agricultural systems.”

It is likely that some of these feedbacks are already underway. The IPCC had originally projected the disappearance of the Arctic’s late summer sea ice by the end of the century. But this year, Mark Serreze, head of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, reported: “The Arctic sea ice has reached its four lowest summer extents (area covered) in the last four years. I stand by my previous statements that the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It’s not going to recover.” Scientists fear the summer sea ice could disappear within three years.

The implications could be catastrophic. The accelerating sea ice melt is linked to the thawing of the Arctic permafrost, beneath which is trapped in the form of methane double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Current emissions levels, if unchanged, would lead local Arctic temperatures to rise up to around 8C. World permafrost expert Vladimir Romanovsky of the University of Alaska notes that this would be enough for half the world’s permafrost to thaw to a depth of several metres, releasing the vast stores of methane into the atmosphere. Another permafrost expert, Ted Schuur of the University of Florida, observes that the process of thawing and methane release could rapidly accelerate over decades, most likely in the form of a 50-year meltdown intensifying due to rapid feedbacks. The result would be a process of irreversible, runaway warming that would make life on earth largely uninhabitable – “Venus syndrome”, in Hansen’s words.

Unfortunately, even peak oil will not save us. While the International Energy Agency recently confirmed that world crude oil production most likely peaked in 2006 – leading the watchdog’s chief economist Fatih Birol to observe that “the age of cheap oil is over” – there is still enough oil shale, tar sands, coal and natural gas to burn through the first quarter of this century. To be sure, that is not long – but it is long enough to potentially push us off a climate cliff.

Rapid decarbonisation of the economy is therefore not an option. It is a last ditch emergency response necessary for our survival in the emerging post-carbon age. But we cannot achieve this as long as we cling to the mantra of unlimited economic growth on a finite planet. As University of Surrey economist Tim Jackson proves in his Prosperity Without Growth, efforts to ‘decouple’ growth from availability of cheap fossil fuels have not only failed, they have actually gone in reverse.

This means we need to fundamentally re-think the very definition of prosperity if we are to ensure that our children inherit viable societies on a liveable planet. The economics of the fossil fuel age is now obsolete. It needs to be written for the post-carbon age.

The Oil Drum Book Review of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization

2010-11-16T16:30:00.003Z

Oil Drum contributing editor Jeff Vail reviews of my book here for one of the world's leading online energy analysis journals:

Anyone who has spent much time discussing peak oil, the collapse of civilizations, climate change or modern security issues eventually confronts the issue of historical antecedents. The [Insert choice of vanished civilization here] collapsed because of X, and that’s the same thing that is happening now . . . . For those who have delved more deeply into such lines of argument, one thing becomes abundantly clear: historical civilizations did not collapse for a single reason. Rather, their troubles, descent and eventual demise or transition were the result of a system of crises. Fast-forward to present, and there is no shortage of commentary forecasting crisis or collapse of our modern civilization. Perhaps for purposes of marketing, simplicity, or simple ignorance, we are awash in commentary on how climate change will spell disaster, or how peak oil will spell disaster, or famine or disease, etc. But these analysts have failed to advance a comprehensive systems-theory approach to our civilization’s troubles. Enter Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed.

Read the rest.

The end of cheap oil - a critical view

2010-11-16T16:26:00.003Z

First published in Le Monde diplomatique

The implications of the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) new report, World Energy Outlook 2010, are stark. Its 25-year ‘New Policies Scenario’ projects that it is most probable that conventional crude oil production “never regains its all-time peak of 70 million barrels per day reached in 2006.” In this scenario, crude oil production is most likely to stay on a plateau of around 68-69 million barrels per day. So there you have it. We are now, in all likelihood, living in a ‘post-peak’ world.

The IEA blames a number of factors for this – a combination of supply constraints due to below-ground geological resource limits, and above-ground factors such as political obstacles to fully exploiting existing reserves (such as in Iraq), as well as international commitments to reducing fossil fuel emissions to meet climate targets.

So is this the end of industrial civilization as we know it? The IEA insists - not yet. Despite the peak of conventional oil production, the IEA concludes that total growth in liquid fuels from other unconventional sources – such as tar sands, oil shale and natural gas liquids – will not only make-up for the short-fall in crude, but actually rise as high as around 99 million barrels per day (mbd) until around 2035. Despite this apparent optimism – by this scenario, there are no imminent fuel shortages – we have passed a historic tipping point. In the words of IEA chief economist Fatih Birol, “The age of cheap oil is over.”

The problem is that unconventional sources of oil and gas are far more expensive to get out of the ground and process into usable petroleum, and environmentally problematic. This means that over the next decade, oil prices are likely to become more expensive. Driven largely by industrial growth in places like China and India demand is projected to grow by 36 per cent up to 2035 – at which point, the price of oil will rise beyond $200 a barrel. On the way, by around 2015, we could see price hikes above $100 a barrel.

Unfortunately, a large body of independent scientific literature suggests that the IEA’s favoured scenario is far too optimistic, on a whole range of issues. The Agency forecasts, for instance, that Iraq will be able to triple its production by 2035, and that Saudi Arabia’s production will double. Yet this looks rather unlikely. IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), a leading energy consultancy firm vehemently opposed to the idea of peak oil, nevertheless project that the most we can hope for is for Iraq to increase its output to of 6.5 mbd by 2020 – half of Iraq’s actual target.

As for Saudi Arabia, the late energy investment analyst Matthew Simmons concluded in his extensive book, Twilight in the Desert (2005) that the Saudi oil fields are largely in decline. “Today, the entire field still contains a great deal of crude oil”, reports US energy consultant Michael Lynch of Gerson Lehrman Group, referring to Saudis’ most prized field, Ghawar, responsible for six per cent of the world’s oil supplies – “but it is much harder to get and the production rates continue to fall off.” He characterizes Ghawar as “largely depleted.”

The IEA’s hopes that unconventional oil and gas could rise rapidly to meet expected demand may also be misplaced. “If conventional oil production is at peak production then projected unconventional oil production cannot mitigate peaking of conventional oil alone”, concluded a study by University of Newcastle chemical engineer, Steve Mohr, published in Energy Policy. A Boston University study, concurred, finding that the Energy Return On Investment (EROI) – the energy you get out compared to what you put in – is simply infinitesimal, at around 1:1 or 2:1, compared to conventional oil’s EROI at the well head of 20:1. What about unconventional gas? Although EROI is quite high at inception, the EROI of all gas production rapidly declines as energy costs of compression and distribution to consumers is factored in. An extensive analysis by former Amoco petroleum geologist and World Oil columnist Arthur Berman, who has consulted for ExxonMobil and Total, fundamentally undermines industry forecasts for natural gas production based on shale gas inputs. He argues that actual shale gas production rates are less than half of official industry projections – this is because production decline rates at shale wells are far higher than assumed.

“Many believe that the high initial rates and cumulative production of shale plays prove their success”, says Berman. “What they miss is that production decline rates are so high that, without continuous drilling, overall production would plummet. There is no doubt that the shale gas resource is very large. The concern is that much of it is non-commercial even at price levels that are considerably higher than they are today.”

If the IEA is right about everything, we are in for a rough ride. But if as the above suggests, the IEA is right about us passing the peak of conventional oil in 2006, but almost fanatical in its faith in the prospects for expanded production from unconventional sources, then we are in for an even rougher ride.

The ‘post-peak’ world clearly does not imply the End of the World: but it implies an extremely volatile one, whose dynamics will be difficult to predict. It is a world not of easy abundance, but of declining – and increasingly expensive – carbon-based resources. If we are to develop sufficient resilience to the various price shocks and converging crises of the ‘post-peak’ world, we will need to recognize that they are symptomatic of an inevitable civilizational transition toward an emerging post-carbon age. There is no time for denial. Governments and communities need to start adapting now.

The Age of Cheap Oil is Over

2010-11-16T16:21:00.001Z

First published in New Statesman

We are now inhabiting a ‘post-peak’ world. That is the implication of the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) new report, World Energy Outlook 2010, which in its 25-year ‘New Policies Scenario’ projects that it is most probable that conventional crude oil production “never regains its all-time peak of 70 million barrels per day reached in 2006.” In this scenario, crude oil production is most likely to stay on a plateau of around 68-69 million barrels per day.

So is this the end of industrial civilization as we know it? Not quite. Or perhaps, not yet. Despite the peak of conventional oil production, the IEA concludes that total growth in liquid fuels from other unconventional sources – such as tar sands, oil shale and natural gas liquids – will continue to make-up for the short-fall in crude until around 2035. But while this means there will be no imminent fuel shortages as such, it also means, in the words of IEA chief economist Fatih Birol, “The age of cheap oil is over.”

Even if the ‘post-peak’ world by no means implies the End of the World, it will nevertheless be an extremely volatile one if business-as-usual continues. The convergence of food and financial crises we saw in 2008 was one of the first signs of a strained system. Oil price volatility due to peak oil was a major factor that induced the 2008 banking crash. The collapse of the mortgage house of cards was triggered by ‘post-peak’ oil price shocks, which escalated costs of living and led to a cascade of debt-defaults. A study by US economist James Hamilton for the US Congress Joint Economic Committee confirmed there would have been no recession without the oil price shocks.

The oil shocks also impacted on food prices. The global industrial food system is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, consuming ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food energy produced. As noted by Australian agricultural expert Julian Cribb in his book The Coming Famine (2010), the six-fold rise in food prices between 2003 and mid-2008 was triggered by escalating oil prices (among other factors), and impacted severely on “farmers’ fuel, fertilizer, pesticide, and transportation costs.” While “financial pain was high” in developed countries, in the less developed world – from where the developed countries import much of their food – “farmers simply could not afford to buy fertilizer, and crop yields began to slip.”

All this was exacerbated by a debt-dependent economic system that systematized the very kinds of dodgy derivatives trading which generated subprime mortgage blowback – with speculators throwing money into futures markets for oil and staple food commodities, rocketing prices even higher. The recession that such price hikes partially inflicted, leading consumption and production to drastically contract, allowed prices to drop. But as economies tentatively recover, as populations grow, as demand rises, the danger that we once again hit the ceiling of the world’s oil capacity limits will remain.

So if the IEA is anywhere near right, we are in for a rather rough ride. The volatility of the ‘post-peak’ world will be difficult to predict. It is a world not of easy abundance, but of declining – and increasingly expensive – carbon-based resources. If we are to develop sufficient resilience to the various price shocks and converging crises of the ‘post-peak’ world, we will need to recognize that they are symptomatic of an inevitable civilizational transition toward an emerging post-carbon age. There is no time for denial. Governments and communities need to start adapting now.

On George W. Bush's Torture Lauding - my letter in the Evening Standard

2010-11-11T18:33:00.004Z

I had a letter published in the Evening Standard earlier this week. It was a slightly abridged version of the following:

Dear Sir,

One need only read between the lines of George W. Bush’s memoirs to realise that his unapologetic lauding over torture is merely a front of bravado, designed to disguise serious questions about deeper US intelligence failures which facilitated the 9/11 attacks – failures that occurred on his watch.

Former CIA official Robert Baer, a case officer assigned to the Middle East for two decades, told MSNBC Hardball’s Chris Matthews over a year ago that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad had been water-boarded 183 times, leaving him “almost brain dead.” The ex-CIA operator also pointed out that absolutely no useful intelligence was gained from this exercise.

In Time Magazine, Baer dissected transcripts of KSM’s interrogations released by the Pentagon, finding that while he “comes across as boasting, at times mentally unstable”, he is also clearly “making things up.” But worse, Baer points out that the transcripts, for whatever reason, systematically obscure “evidence of state support to al-Qaeda”. He cites well-known evidence in the intelligence community that major US geopolitical allies in the ‘War on Terror’ – Pakistani intelligence services, along with members of the Qatari and Saudi royal families – have harboured and aided al-Qaeda generally and KSM specifically. Worse, and contradicting Bush’s narrative again, Baer emphasises that KSM had “offered no information about European networks”, and that he “apparently knew nothing” about militants planning attacks on London.

Bush played a central role in crushing pre-9/11 intelligence investigations into the deleterious effects of US relations with countries like Saudi Arabia. Multiple FBI leads identifying key financial and other links between Saudi elites, members of the bin Laden family, and Osama bin Laden himself were shut down in 2001, despite a growing crescendo of warnings of an impending attack involving planes being used as bombs. The fact that this may have had something do with cosy financial Bush-Saudi family deals – such as through the defence investment conglomerate Carlyle Group (where both Bush and the bin Laden family had investments) – raises awkward questions about Bush’s current efforts to vindicate his unconscionable failures both before and after 9/11.

In this context, Keith Vaz's pointed question about US-UK intelligence sharing is on the mark. That is not to suggest that such sharing should simply cease, but it is certainly legitimate to wonder to what extent American strategic interests - and ideology - determine the way trans-atlantic intelligence cooperation works. It is not only a matter of how much MI6 might have known about US methods such as torture, but ultimately about the way the US conducts its whole approach to security, and whether it is undermining our own - with fatal consequences at home.

Yours,

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

The Next Crisis: How business-as-usual will kill us all

2010-11-11T18:10:00.002Z

First published in Ceasefire Magazine

2008 was the year of crisis convergence. Escalating oil price spikes coincided with similar spikes in the prices of staple foods, both driven by a combination of production-supply constraints, rocketing demand, and the ensuing bonanza of commodity trading on futures markets. Then the banks collapsed, prompting massive government bailouts designed to shore-up a crumbling financial system.

As I argued in my previous article for Ceasefire, this convergence of energy, food and economic crises was no accident, but the inevitable outcome of a business-as-usual model of behaviour for a global political economic system that was now reaching its own internal limits, as well as breaching the limits of the natural environment.

Despite official assurances that the worst is over, that economies are now recovering and re-growing, current trends illustrate that the worst is yet to come – and that policymakers are clueless about the fundamental structural causes of crisis convergence.

The first fundamental problem is that orthodox neoliberal economists fail to understand the obvious reality of the embeddedness of the economy in the natural environment. For the economy to grow requires increasing inputs of energy, obtained from exploitation of natural resources – currently, for the most part, fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal.

In theory, orthodox economists like to argue that capitalism can solve the energy-dependence problem by maximizing efficiency, so that the greater the economic growth, the more efficient the use of resources, and thus the less actual energy is required. This sort of argument underpins government support for the oxymoron of ‘high growth, low carbon’ societies. As is common with neoliberal economic theory, the empirical data raises serious questions about this argument. As Tim Jackson shows unequivocally in his Prosperity Without Growth (pp. 74-6), global trends in fossil fuels and carbon emissions as well as extraction of metal ores and non-metallic minerals have escalated dramatically in the last two decades. In many cases, Jackson observes: “Global resource intensities (the ratios of resource use to GDP), far from declining, have been increasing significantly across a range of non-fuel minerals. Resource efficiency is going in the wrong direction.” (p. 75)

Between 2005 and 2008, world conventional oil production has struggled along an undulating plateau that is unprecedented in the history of world oil production, and is unlikely to be able to rise significantly beyond 2008 levels. As noted by Dr. James Schlesinger – a former US Secretary of Energy (1977-79), Defense Secretary (1973-75) and CIA Director – “given projected decline curves running from 4 to 6 percent, and the projected increase in demand during the next quarter century, we shall require the new capacity equivalence of five Saudi Arabias.” Whatever the uncertainties over deepwater and unconventional reserves and so on, he points out that “in general we must expect to get along without what has been our critical energy source in expanding the world’s economy for more than half a century.”

While supply levels appear to be wavering, a resurgence in demand due to a fragile economic recovery indicates the probability of another near-term oil price spike as rising demand hits relatively flat capacity limits. Much of the rising rampant demand for oil is not from the West, but from emerging industrial economies, such as China, and has already led financial institutions such as JP Morgan to predict an imminent rise in oil prices to $100 per barrel.

Simultaneously, with oil prices set to rise again, we are witnessing a return to spiralling prices for meat, sugar, rice, wheat and maize. As financial forecaster Addison Wiggin warned in a Forbes article at the end of October, “we could be just one supply shock away from a full-blown food crisis that would make the price spikes of 2008 look like a happy memory”. He points out that the 2008 food crisis “never really went away”, given that key farm commodities, although not as high as 2008 levels, are still higher than pre-2008 levels:

Corn: Up 63%
Wheat: Up 84%
Soybeans: Up 24%
Sugar: Up 55%

Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture has warned of falling wheat production next year, largely due to the impact of the Russian drought on agriculture, and highlighted a considerable drop in US corn production this year – apparently the biggest drop in harvest expectations “ever.”

The link between current food supply shortfalls and climate change can no longer be ignored in the aftermath of the devastating impact of the Russian heat-wave and Pakistan floods on agriculture, fitting into the long-term predicted pattern of increased erratic weather and natural disasters due to global warming. The latest projections from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) based on a business-as-usual model suggest that within 30 years, the world could face an extreme permanent drought over parts of Asia, the US, southern Europe, as well as large areas of Africa, Latin America and the Middle East – with a devastating impact on agriculture and water resources.

The plateau in world oil production is not helping matters. Higher oil prices will generate an inflationary effect on the economy, exacerbating food price hikes. Further, because the industrial food system in its current form is so heavily dependent on fossil fuel inputs at multiple levels – onsite machinery; synthesis and production of fertilizers; processing, packaging, storage and transport of food – the energy supply plateau will enforce fundamental limits on world food production, worsening the price spikes.

Unfortunately, the orthodox economic toolbox is likely to accelerate rather than ameliorate the convergence of these crises over the next few years. Currently, despite promising indicators of continuing GDP growth – taken by many as evidence of a continuing if fragile economic recovery – the underlying realities tell a very different story. Current total world derivatives trades remain at around the same levels as they were in late 2008 – about $1 quadrillion (thousand trillion) – which is a colossal 23 times world GDP. As noted by DK Matai, a leading global strategic risk analyst and government advisor on complex security threats, “The entire derivatives-based structured finance pyramid can keel over when the asset prices begin to decline and as a result, some of the counter-parties are unable to meet obligations”, as happened in the lead-up to the 2008 crash.

The problem is that this danger has hardly been eliminated – but perhaps has even increased. Matai continues: “Even if 1% of the derivatives pyramid loses counterparties because they have become insolvent, that is more than 10 trillion dollars of a black hole. If that 1% becomes 5%, that is more than 50 trillion dollars, ie, more than the GDP of the entire world.”

Currently, orthodox government economic strategy, based on neoliberal principles, has been focused on attempting to kick-start economic ‘growth’ through more asset-price inflation and derivatives trading – including on commodities like oil and food: that is, re-inflating the unsustainable debt-bubble that burst two years ago. The extensive bank bailouts – quantitative easing – served only to shore-up insolvent banks and financial institutions with tax-payers money. This reduced the amount of money in circulation – contracting the real-world economy rooted in actual production, buying and selling – while permitting financiers to re-engage in their traditional activities. But both the US and UK authorities have acknowledged the probability of further quantitative easing purportedly to sustain continued economic recovery. Simultaneously, massive IMF-style austerity measures are set to constrain consumption and manufacturing, cut-down public services, while increasing unemployment.

The upward pressures in terms of price spikes for oil and food, both driven by fundamental production constraints impinging on supply in combination with regressive derivatives futures trading, will over the coming years generate an inflationary effect that will, as it did prior to 2008, impact on consumers massively. More quantitative easing, by taking taxpayers’ money out of the real-world economy and plunging it into the virtual financial world, in effect amounts to re-inflating a fictional bubble of ‘growth’ while simultaneously reducing the size of the real-world box in which the bubble is supposed to grow.

Consumers and businesses will struggle to continue to repay debts, even as the debt-derivatives bubble becomes re-inflated in the context of more quantitative easing. Simultaneously, as debt-driven ‘growth’ continues to fuel a semblance of a seeming economic recovery, increasing economic activity will inevitably hit the limits of the world’s plateauing and gradually declining hydrocarbon energy base.

Inevitably, the bubble will breach the limits of sustainability, both in terms of the capacity for debt-settlements as well as in terms of energy inputs from hydrocarbon resources. The result will be another crisis convergence, another comprehensive crash, encompassing the food, energy and economic sectors simultaneously with price hikes intensifying debt-defaults and thus deflating the derivatives bubble – all driven ultimately by a global political economy whose structural organization requires the physically impossible: infinite growth on a finite planet.

The next crisis, moreover, is hardly likely to be the last, as we continue to strain the earth’s hydrocarbon resources while thereby increasingly devastating the planet’s ecosystems and altering its climate. Rather it will be the second of several more rounds of crisis convergence, symptomatic of a protracted process of global system failure.

The question we all need to ask ourselves is, how much crisis can we take, before we wake up and realize that business-as-usual is killing us?

First Book Review - A US economist on my 'A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization'

2010-10-29T15:22:00.003Z

I've just found the first print review of my new book, published by ArtVoice, which is apparently the number one weekly newsmagazine in western New York, Buffalo. The review is part of a wider article on government water policy in the Great Lakes region, and comes courtesy of Bruce L. Fisher, Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies, Buffalo State College at the State University of New York, and also a Visiting Professor of Economics and Finance there.

Fisher sums up the book as "dense, brilliant and frightening." You can read the whole thing here, but the excerpts focusing on my book are below:

[...]

The scientific evidence and the near-universal consensus about the reality of man-made climate change—which results mainly from burning oil and coal—is being met with phenomena like the Democratic Senate candidate from West Virginia, who is running on a platform of opposition to climate-change legislation, a position quite comfortable for every Republican. But as British think-tanker Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed’s new book shows, not only is there a consensus among scientists about catastrophic climate change, there’s a growing recognition that climate change, looming global food shortages, recent and future financial crises and the ongoing plague of political violence and terrorism are all linked by the fossil fuel business.

Ahmed’s A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization is a tough read. It is dense, brilliant, and frightening. Ahmed has done the job that has needed doing: He has connected the dots for the non-specialist. His first depressing achievement is to have collated the dense scientific literature on global warming into a chapter that sums it all up simply: The governments of the major industrialized countries have all come to understand that climate change is for real, and that the catastrophe of a four degree Celsius rise in global temperatures will happen by 2050, but because we are stuck in a global system dominated by petroleum, the governments that should be taking urgent, radical steps to move us to a post-carbon economy are not doing so. Nor, Ahmed says, can they be expected to do so.

Ahmed follows his summation of what the scientists are saying with a still-salient report on the recent global financial crisis, a review of the ongoing Third World food-production crisis, and a long, unsparing look at America’s global lust for oil, a lust that has sometimes put us on both sides of the “war on terror.” The result is a difficult volume that is hard to put down. It is a truly impressive book that is terrifying, but that, sadly, because Ahmed is a Marxist, is destined to be ignored. But you can’t ignore his sources, which include US military documents that concur on the inevitability of major climate change, but that strangely do not map out energy alternatives for America.

Where is President Obama on this? One would think that Obama and his Nobel Prize-winning secretary of energy would have galvanized the nation and created a crash national program on wind and solar power, instead of hurrying up the construction of nuclear power plants—of which there could never be an adequate supply, according to Ahmed’s sources. The creator of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock, pooh-poohed wind and pushed nuclear, but wind power is gaining: Google executives just last week announced that they will spend $5 billion of their pocket change to create a near-shore East Coast wind-powered grid to power more than million homes. Ahmed’s book reports on the astounding strides that the government of Germany has already made in fostering alternative, renewable, carbon-neutral energy. He also gives kudos to some local British successes. But it’s hard to be hopeful in the US today, as the fossil-fuel lobby may be about to retake the House of Representatives.

[...]

Exclusive: Former BP Geologist Confirms 2005 Global Oil Peak

2010-10-29T14:19:00.002Z

We have just published a new report at the Institute for Policy Research & Development (IPRD) which finds that world oil production peaked between 2005 and 2008, and is currently in inexorable decline. Authored by the renowned 40-year veteran petroleum geologist Dr. Colin J. Campbell, who has worked and consulted for leading oil companies such as British Petroleum (BP), Shell and Exxon, the report warns that the “first half of the Oil Age” is over, and the “second half” – characterized by a gradual but increasing decline in production, has now arrived.

Drawing on an extensive country-by-country analysis of oil production data, Dr. Campbell concludes that world regular conventional oil peaked in 2005, prompting oil prices to rise dramatically as traders bought contracts on the oil futures market. The oil price shocks were instrumental in triggering the 2008 economic recession, which dampened demand and allowed prices to reduce. Regular conventional oil is currently declining at 3 per cent a year, with the decline of all categories of oil being about half that rate for the next decade or so before edging upwards.

“We are now inhabiting a post-peak economy”, said Dr. Campbell. “In the first half of the oil age, cheap, mainly oil-based energy has fuelled economic prosperity and related money supply. There is a fundamental difference between going up and going down. In the second half of the oil age, although the decline has begun gently, it represents a turning point of historic magnitude.”

In May 2005, Dr. Campbell predicted that an imminent peak in world oil production would lead to a stock market decline and banking crisis between 2008 and 2012. Dr. Campbell now forecasts a future price limit of around $100 per barrel – at current dollar value – noting that coming oil price shocks will impose further economic recession, dampening demand. He further critiques government bank bailouts to stimulate consumerism by pumping out more credit as doomed to failure, as any economic recovery would lead to a rise in demand for oil, again hitting the supply barrier leading to another price shock and renewed recession. Such policies could lead to “rampant inflation and dollar devaluation.”

The £100 price limit would restrain investments in more expensive unconventional oil and gas, which in any case will “have little impact on peak itself” but may be “important in ameliorating the post-peak decline.” World production of conventional gas is likely to peak around 2015 – with unconventional gas peaking much later, though subject to “slow and costly extraction rates.”

The Campbell report also warns that “resource wars” for control of the world’s remaining oil reserves have already begun, noting efforts to kick-start oil production in postwar Iraq, and that the war in Afghanistan, although less successful, “lies on a planned pipeline route from the Caspian.” Similarly, tensions with Iran cannot be de-linked from its substantial oil and gas resources. Dr. Campbell calls for greater governmental efforts at adaptation, highlighting that a failure to develop viable alternative energy supplies would make projected population growth unsustainable.

Dr. Campbell's outstanding new report confirms my own findings, as elaborated in my new peer-reviewed study, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization, which examined a variety of academic and industry reports both for and against 'peak oil'. Despite every year insisting that peak oil will not happen for another 40 years, BP's own 2010 production data shows that world oil production was on a plateau between 2005 and 2008, and has been declining every since. The data is now unequivocal: we inhabit a 'post-peak' world, and it is imperative for policymakers to pay attention.

Dr. Colin Campbell's new IPRD report can be downloaded here. Learn more about my new book here.

The Great Transition (beyond carbon)

2010-10-08T17:04:00.003Z

Shorter variations of this article have been published by the United Nations University's 'OurWorld 2.0'; Daily News Egypt, and Pakistan Observer. The longer versions are available at the Public Intelligence Blog, and Energy Bulletin.

If there is one thing that defines the 21^st century, it is the end of oil. But not just oil. Over the coming decades, we face the prospect of terminal depletion of the world’s major mineral energy reserves, with major ramifications for the future of industrial civilization.

A survey of about a hundred of the world’s most respected petroleum geologists by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil found that the vast majority expected world oil production to peak between 2010 and 2020, and that “the ‘peak’ is more likely to look like a bump on a long ridge than the classic bell-shaped curve.”

As the late geoscientist M. King Hubbert first noted, ‘peak oil’ occurs when world oil production reaches its maximum level at the point when half the world’s reserves of cheap oil have been depleted, after which it becomes geophysically increasingly difficult to extract it. This means that passed the half-way point, world production can never reach its maximum level again, and thus continuously declines until reserves are depleted. Using his model, Hubbert successfully predicted, to the shock of detractors, the peak of US oil production in the 1970s, after which the US became a net importer.

Unfortunately, the data suggests that world oil production has either already peaked, or is very close to peaking – and that we may well now inhabit a post-peak world. Until 2004, world oil production had risen continuously but thereafter underwent a plateau all the way through to 2008. Then from July to August 2008, world oil production fell by almost one million barrels per day. It is still falling. According to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2010 – which as usual assures us that world oil production will not peak for another 40 years – in 2009 world oil production was 2.6 percent below that in 2008 (falling 2 million barrels per day), and is now below 2004 levels – indicative of a gradually accelerating decline rate.

2004 80371 thousand barrels per day
2005 81261
2006 81557
2007 81446
2008 81995
2009 79948

BP’s own data contradicts its professed optimism. This plateau in world production over half a decade is unprecedented, and suggests we have already started on the “long ridge” whose overall trajectory despite fluctuation will be inexorably downwards. The outlook is likely to be worse, given that according to a new peer-reviewed study by the UK government’s former chief scientific adviser Sir David King in the journal Energy Policy (38, 8, 08/10), official estimates of world total oil reserves (including conventional, deepwater and unconventional resources) should be downgraded from 1,150-1,350bn barrels to between 850-900bn barrels. This corroborates the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) admission in its World Energy Outlook 2009 that the apparent doubling of world reserves since 1980 were politically-motivated, coming largely from upward revisions by OPEC countries “driven by negotiations at that time over production quotas and have little to do with the discovery of new reserves or physical appraisal work on discovered fields.”

Reserve size by itself matters only insofar as it practically translates into actual annual oil flows and rates of production. The problem, as noted by Matt Mushalik – presenting the findings of former BP oil analyst Chris Skrebowski – is that “almost half of the current global oil production (45%) comes from a very narrow reserve base of just 190 Gb or around 1/5th of the remaining reserves. It is depleting rapidly at a rate of around 7 % pa., with annual production declining consistently since 2002.” Remaining reserves contribute to “little over half the global annual flows” and “at much lower production rates”, most likely because they “are not able to increase production.”

Dallas petroleum geologist Jeffrey J. Brown’s Export Land Model projects a maximum of nine years between the time an oil-producer peaks and the reduction of its oil exports to zero. No wonder then that various experts warn we could see an actual oil supply crunch between 2012 and 2015, after which prices would rise inexorably as supplies drop and demand rises – fuelled by industrial and population growth in emerging markets like China and India.

Unfortunately, oil is not the only problem. Unconventional oil, coal, and natural gas may well be unable to compensate for the shortfall.

For the first time, in 2005 ExxonMobil’s own world oil production forecast showed no contribution from ‘oil shale’ even by 2030. Similarly, the Hydrocarbon Depletion Study Group at Uppsala University in Sweden investigated the viability of a crash programme for the Canadian tar sands industry between 2006 and 2018, and up to 2050. It concluded that even adopting “a very optimistic scenario Canada’s oil sands will not prevent Peak Oil.” Another study commissioned by the investor coalition Ceres warns that production costs, market instability, and low energy return on investment (EROI) of less than a third of conventional oil’s EROI, are endangering the viability of investments in unconventional oil.

Of course, the Gulf oil spill has put to rest previously widespread (but misplaced) optimism about the potential of deepwater reserves, due to the moratorium on future deepwater exploration. In any case, even before the disaster, the data points to a “sharply slowing and then flattening deepwater growth profile” by 2011, amidst acceleration in “the pace of deepwater decline.” As Bob MacKnight, analyst at the Washington-based PFC Energy, thus concludes, “We are really approaching a peak production in deep water” and new discoveries will only “shallow the decline rather than move the peak.”

The situation looks similar for the future of natural gas production. The interplay between prices and technological breakthroughs may permit deeper drilling of unconventional gas reserves for a longer period – 118 years at “current demand” according to one optimistic projection. But estimates of world demand project a massive 49 percent increase up to 2035 – fueled particularly by China and India. According to former Total geologist Jean Laherrere, who has conducted one of the most comprehensive surveys of the available conventional and unconventional gas reserve and production data, global natural gas production will peak around 2025 – cohering with Canadian geologist David Hughes’ projection of peak gas arriving in 2027.

As for coal supplies, an extensive study by the Energy Watch Group (EGW) warns that global coal production is likely to peak around 2025, at 30 percent above 2007 levels of production. US coal production in terms of energy will only remain at current levels for another 10–15 years. However, just this year the journal Science published a study predicting that world coal production from existing reserves could peak as early as 2011, and that it is “unlikely” future discoveries would ameliorate the decline.

In a separate study, EGW warned that world production of uranium for nuclear energy would peak between 2030 and 2035. This corroborates the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) 2001 projections for uranium production up to 2050 that “presently known [uranium] resources fall short of demand” and that “future exploration will be more difficult”; as well as industry warnings, such as that in 2005 by Cameco – the world’s largest uranium producer – to the effect that global demand will “outpace existing supply over the next decade by more than 400 million pounds.”

Although thorium has been advocated as a potential ‘magic bullet’ due to wide availability and potentially higher EROI, according to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Washington DC thorium still requires uranium to “kick-start” a nuclear chain reaction. Additionally, despite decades of research, no one has yet developed a commercially-viable thorium breeder fuel cycle, not even in India. The other problem is simply that the mining, transporting, refining, milling, waste reprocessing and construction processes of nuclear power are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Indeed, an extensive study published in the International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology finds that nuclear power is simply not efficient enough to replace fossil fuels in any case, requiring nuclear production to increase by 10.5 per cent every year from 2010 to 2050 – an “unsustainable prospect.”

The cumulative implications are unequivocal: industrial civilization faces multiple, converging shortages in the supply of energy across the spectrum of traditional hydrocarbon-linked reserves. These shortages are all likely to converge within the first quarter of this century.

The exponential demographic, economic, and technological growth associated with the birth and expansion of industrial civilization we have experienced for the last century or so, has been tied indelibly to the seemingly unlimited availability of carbon-based energy. This growth has also been made possible only by quite deliberate efforts on the part of the major powers to dominate the world’s strategic energy reserves, particularly in the Middle East and Central Asia – a matter which has played a central role in geopolitical competition and conflict in the postwar period. The neoliberal doctrine of unlimited growth, however, overlooks the finite reality of the earth’s resources. We now face the fact that our traditional resource-base for continued exponential industrial growth simply does not exist. This suggests that industrial civilization in its current form simply cannot survive this century.

As international security expert Michael Klare points out, “major oil-consuming nations are more dependent than ever on supplies from countries that are prone to rebellion, ethnic strife, separatism, sabotage and coups d’état – often instigated by the lure of oil wealth” – and the ‘War on Terror’ serves usefully to sanitize this stark reality. But given the speed of resource depletion, militarization offers no lasting solution beyond the spectre of renewed geopolitical competition, if not major conflict, to dominate the world’s fast diminishing hydrocarbon energy supplies.

As we have never before experienced the energy-economic system of a ‘post-peak’ world, it is difficult to accurately model how it might look in practice. Both alarmists and optimists may find themselves surprised. But one thing is clear: if governments and international institutions continue their current failure to grasp the significance of this hydrocarbon-energy crisis convergence, then there will be serious consequences for the ability of states to continue to deliver public goods and services.

Given the scale of supply constraints across the spectrum of traditional energy sources, we may find it very difficult to scale-up a viable supply of energy to replace cheap, conventional oil in time to avoid the collapse of critical infrastructures. The converging complexity of major stresses including energy depletion, climate change, food insecurity, economic instability and violent conflict – combined with the increasingly obvious inability of states to keep up with and respond to these crises meaningfully – could create a perfect storm culminating in “synchronous failure”, leading to collapse. And a short-sighted reversion to traditional military solutions would more likely accelerate, rather than avoid, this collapse.

When might such “synchronous failure” occur? In mid-2009 the UK government’s chief scientific adviser Sir John Beddington warned that we could expect a ‘perfect storm’ of food, water and energy crises by 2030. However, my own assessment of ‘crisis convergence’ – based on six years of interdisciplinary research poring over thousands of academic studies and industry reports – suggests that “synchronous failure” could arrive as early as 2018 on a business-as-usual model.

The imperative, then, is to work toward facilitating a comprehensive transition to cleaner, renewable sources of energy; while doing our best to downsize our current levels of consumption and increase resilience. As study, after study, after study, after study has proven, the mix of technologies to achieve this transition already exist – a major impasse, of course, is how fast the process of transition could occur. Unfortunately, sheer social, political and technological inertia, if nothing else, could slow the transition process significantly (ecologist Vaclav Smil notes that historically, energy transitions have been a generations-long process). While we may be unable therefore to avoid catastrophic short-falls, these could be ameliorated by focusing efforts to radically reduce fossil fuel consumption through conservation and energy efficiency.

The economic model of an ‘ideal-world’ 100 per cent, post-carbon renewable energy system is still only theoretical, but it is clear that it cannot be based on exponential growth for its own sake. This speaks to a new post-carbon civilization based on greater consciousness of human-embeddedness in our natural environment; of the significance of mutual cooperation rather than self-seeking competition as an evolutionary imperative for species survival; and thus of less-materialistic values oriented around health, freedom, education, and well-being as central to sustainable prosperity.

The 21^st century may well signify the end of industrial civilization as-we-know-it – but it also points to the unprecedented opportunity to envision, and work toward, a far more equitable, sustainable and harmonious post-carbon civilization.

US Sorry for Medical Experiments in Guatemala - Will US Apologize for 60,000 plus Civilian Deaths?

2010-10-01T20:22:00.004Z

Today's announcement that the US is "sorry" for conducting medical experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s, where prisoners were deliberately infected with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), is undoubtedly a welcome acknowledgement.

But let's face it. It's a bit rich.

And it begs the question. Will the US come clean, and wholeheartedly apologize, and give reparations, for the tens of thousands of innocent civilians slaughtered by right-wing death squads sponsored by an illegitimate US-installed and sponsored Guatemalan regime?

The 1940s experiments in Guatemala were part of a wider, now well-documented, pattern of US imperial interference that escalated in the context of the 1994 democratic revolution that brought the Arbenz government to power. US official attitudes to the democratization of Guatemala were candidly described in a variety of now declassified internal documents I discuss in this paper.

In 1952, US intelligence noted the rise of “militant advocacy of social reforms and nationalistic policies identified with the Guatemalan revolution of 1944”, resulting in 10 years of democracy - before the US intervened directly to secure strategic interests. “The radical and nationalistic policies” included “the persecution of foreign economic interests, especially the United Fruit Company”, and had won “the support or acquiescence of almost all Guatemalans.” The government had generated “mass support for the present regime”, proceeding “to mobilize the hitherto politically inert peasantry” via agrarian reform and labour organization, undermining the hegemony of large foreign landowners. But democracy was not to be lauded - it was a serious problem: “Guatemalan official propaganda, with its emphasis on conflict between democracy and dictatorship and between national independence and ‘economic imperialism’, is a disturbing factor in the Caribbean area”, the US concluded.

In other documents, the US noted that the democratic revolution of 1944 had contributed to “a strong national movement to free Guatemala from the military dictatorship, social backwardness, and ‘economic colonialism’, which had been the pattern of the past”. The “social and economic programs of the elected government met the aspirations” of the impoverished, and “inspired the loyalty and conformed to the self-interest of most political conscious Guatemalans.” Hence, “neither the landholders nor the [United] Fruit Company can expect any sympathy in Guatemalan public opinion.” Worse still, the government’s “agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbours where similar conditions prevail.”

Cold War 'Domino theory' was not seriously concerned by the threat of 'international communism' per se. It was more worried about the danger that a whole region might be inspired by a successful model of nationalist economic independence. So something had to be done. In the words of a 1949 CIA assessment, this programme was “distinctly unfriendly to US business interests”. Similarly, the US State Department acknowledged that such policies constituted a threat to Guatemala as “a place for capital investment”. (See Mark Curtis' Ambiguities of Power, Zed, 1995 p. 152)

So in 1954, the US and British teamed up to violently overthrow Arbenz's reformist democratic administration, and installed Col. Castillo Armas. To keep the new, illegitimate, counter-democratic dictatorship in power required extensive 'force projection', in particular the creation and support of a lethal network of government-backed right-wing death squads whose sole task was to slaughter peasants into submission.

Amnesty International (AI) reported at the time that “tortures and murders... are part of a deliberate and long-standing program of the Guatemalan Government” and that the “selection of targets for detention and murder, and the deployment of official forces for extra-legal operations can be pin-pointed to secret offices in an annex of Guatemala’s National Palace, under the direct control of the President of the Republic.” Upwards of 60,000 people were killed by the 1980s. Further tens of thousands were killed after, and untold hundreds of thousands throughout this process were displaced in a conflict that spanned decades.

One report from Stephen Kinzer in the Boston Global in 1980 says it all. Kinzer cites a report from the National Council of the Jesuit Order in Guatemala as follows: “... it is only necessary to open one’s eyes to realize that here we are ruled by a system of anti-Christian power which destroys life and persecutes those who fight for life... This anguishing situation is being maintained with a repression among the most severe in Guatemala’s recent history. A regime of unjust force is trying to prevent the working people from reclaiming their just rights.” The Council reported over three thousand killings in the first ten months of 1979 alone, by government-backed death squads acting “with total impunity. It is axiomatic that in Guatemala there are no political prisoners, only the dead and disappeared."

This kind of analysis could go on ad nauseum. The history is well-documented.

So the question remains. Will the US say "sorry" for the destruction of democracy in Guatemala, for the hundreds of thousands lives lost, for the millions repressed?

The Real ClimateGate, Part 2: Why the IPCC stands stronger than ever

2010-09-30T14:20:00.006Z

In Part 1, we showed that the University of East Anglia climate emails scandal was nothing but a colossal waste of time that proved only the hysterical idiocy of fossil-fuel financed climate ‘scepticism’. Continuing to be amply funded by their fossil-fuel benefactors, the leading climate ‘sceptic’ front groups weren’t ready to give up. Not surprising given the degree to which their views are given such media prominence.

One reprehensible example of ridiculous media coverage of climate non-issues was in early 2010, and squarely targeted the IPCC’s famous ‘hockey-stick’ graph. The graph depicts global average temperatures over the last millennium, and shows that the temperature rise of the twentieth century is “likely” to be “unprecedented”. This time, the mainstream media outlet was the Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ claimed that the IPCC’s ‘hockey-stick’ graph – and others like it – were based on the questionable “tree-ring techniques” used by scientist Keith Briffa, as well as on data gathered from these techniques – an issue which emerged in relation to the climate email fiasco we reviewed in Part 1. Yet as one of the climate scientists who contributed to the ‘hockey-stick’ graph study, Michael Mann, points out: “Neither the multiple proxy-based ‘Hockey Stick’ reconstruction of Mann et al nor the multiple-proxy based Jones et al reconstruction used ‘Mr. Briffa’s tree-ring techniques’ let alone their data.”

In fact, the IPCC ‘hockey-stick’ graph has been corroborated and reinforced by numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies. In 2008, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences extended the multi-proxy reconstruction of global average temperatures back nearly 2,000 years. The study was explicitly non-reliant on tree-ring data, and found that: “Our results extend previous conclusions that recent Northern Hemisphere surface temperature increases are likely anomalous in a long-term context. Recent warmth appears anomalous for at least the past 1,300 years whether or not tree-ring data are used.” With tree-ring data, this conclusion can be extended back 1,700 years.

Michael Mann, a lead author of the paper, told the National Geographic: “You can go back nearly 2,000 years and the conclusion still holds – the current warmth is anomalous. The burst of warming over the past one to two decades takes us out of the envelope of natural variability."

With Mann himself completely exonerated from 'sceptic'-fuelled allegations of misconduct and fraud by an official university inquiry, and with the scientific validity of the 'hockey-stick' graph vindicated years ago by a detailed peer-reviewed synthesis report by the US National Academy of Scientists, the 'sceptics' have nothing left to stand on.

Self-styled ‘sceptics’ have tried to counter the compelling evidence encapsulated in the ‘hockey-stick’ graph by claiming it ignores events like the Medieval Warm Period (950–1250). But this again illustrates the dire lack of understanding of very simple elements of climate science. The higher temperatures associated with the Medieval Warm Period were only regional, and did not represent the global average temperatures illustrated in the graph. While warmer temperatures were concentrated in certain regions, other regions were even colder than during the lower regional temperatures during the ensuing Little Ice Age (1300–1850). Again, the MWP issue is dealt with in the peer-reviewed literature.

‘Sceptics’ were also overjoyed when it emerged that the IPCC had promulgated the following major error within its 3,000 pages: that the Himalayan glaciers could “completely disappear” by 2035 and “perhaps sooner” at current rates of warming. The IPCC later conceded that this was an unjustifiable statement which relied not on the peer-reviewed scientific literature, but on a single media interview with a scientist in 1999.

Although widely claimed as a victory of climate ‘scepticism’, the error was not discovered by any ‘sceptic’, but by glacier expert Georg Kaser, himself a lead author of Volume 1, Chapter 4 of the IPCC report.

The way 'sceptics' jumped on this mistake, one would think it disproves the whole of climate science. Unfortunately for the planet, it doesn't - painstaking scientific research repeatedly confirms that the rate of glacier melt is accelerating due to global warming. There is no doubt that Himalayan glaciers fall into this trend of an increasing rate of melt over the last decades. And earlier this year, new peer-reviewed research in Nature Geoscience showed that 75 per cent of ice loss in the Greenland glaciers is due to ocean warmth due to climate change.

Nevertheless, for certain ‘sceptic’ commentators – such as the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker – this was only one out of several alarmist declarations in the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report which were “based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists”:

“Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.”

Booker’s alarmism about the problem of ‘global warming alarmism’, it should be noted, has involved such journalistic wonders as claiming that the threat to human health from white asbestos is “non-existent”, and that passive smoking does not cause cancer. No wonder then that all he had really done was repeat parrot-fashion the equally shoddy journalism of Jonathan Leake, science and environment editor at the Sunday Times, in an article whose research was done by Richard North. It is no coincidence, of course, that Richard North is Christopher Booker’s co-author of a well-known anti-science screed, Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming – a book resoundingly lambasted by both left and right. The Guardian describes it as replete with “egregious errors that would shame a junior reporter” (including “reporting a non-existent interview”), while Richard D. North writing for the Social Affairs Unit slams it for being “strikingly wrong in important respects”. Together, the work of Leake and North, backed up by intellectually-challenged pundits like Booker and James Delingpole, fed into a cycle of news-regurgitation fueled by climate ‘sceptic’ groups, propelling the ‘meme’ of the IPCC’s discrediting worldwide.

The fact of the matter is that all the IPCC’s statements about African crop yields, the intensification of natural disasters and erratic weather, and the potential deforestation of the Amazon are entirely accurate and corroborated by the peer-reviewed literature.

The IPCC’s statement that “yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%” by 2020 refer to a paper by climate expert Professor Ali Agoumi. ‘Sceptics’ shouted that the claim is discredited because the paper is not peer-reviewed. Although technically correct, the paper was a report published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development and the Climate Change Knowledge Network. It constituted “a summary of technical studies and research”, much of which is peer-reviewed, “conducted to inform Initial National Communications from three countries (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,” and was therefore “a perfectly legitimate IPCC reference.” In fact, the IPCC’s specific projection on the potentially devastating impact of climate change on African crop yields is supported by a whole series of peer-reviewed scientific studies from 1994 to 2007.

What about the IPCC’s statements about the link between climate change and natural disasters? Also accurate. The source cited and highlighted by ‘sceptics’ as problematic was a Risk Management Solutions paper by Dr Robert Muir-Wood, a former Earth Sciences Research Fellow at Cambridge University. The full paper is entirely credible, and “was peer reviewed and accepted for publication in November 2006”, a few weeks after “the cut-off date for the IPCC 4^th Assessment Report in October” – explaining why an earlier draft version of the report was referenced by the IPCC. The latter was “aware of the full report and that it had been accepted for publication.” Dr. Muir-Wood himself has publicly confirmed that the IPCC did not misrepresent his conclusions. It’s worth remembering that the link between climate change and the increased risk of natural disasters, including dangerous weather, is widely acknowledged and explored in the peer-reviewed literature.

The other main issue targeted by ‘sceptics’ was the IPCC’s assertion that up to 40 per cent of Amazon rainforests “could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation.” The statement was based on an activist report written by a layman, and published by environmental lobby group, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

In fact, the statement was entirely true. The WWF report sourced a peer-reviewed 1999 paper in the journal Nature by Yale University tropical forest scientist Daniel Nepstad, which categorically confirmed the IPCC’s warning. Nepstad himself responded to the ‘sceptic’ media reports, noting “The IPCC statement on the Amazon is correct”, and citing further peer-reviewed papers written by himself and others corroborating the same conclusion.

We should not forget the 'sceptic' claim that the IPCC's warnings about sea-level rise were false. An independent peer-reviewed 2009 study in Nature Geoscience corroborated the IPCC's sea-level projections due to global warming, warning that levels will rise by between 7 and 82 cm.

Finally, what of claims of financial corruption? Even IPCC chairman Dr. Raj Pachauri did not escape unscathed, being accused of exploiting his position to secure fabulously huge research grants with which he enriched himself. Not only have the allegations been proven to be “untrue” by an independent KPMG audit of all his financial relationships, but Dr. Pachauri has further been found to be “scrupulous to the point of self-denial.”

The degree to which Dr. Pachauri, and other climate scientists – as well as climate science itself – have been subjected to smearing and demonization despite facts being plain for journalists and editors to see if they really cared to is shocking, but illustrative of the extent to which vested special interests want to muddy the waters to stall meaningful political action.

All this goes to prove a single point. The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report has not been discredited as a signifier of the scientific consensus that global warming is anthropogenic. The IPCC itself has not been discredited. The University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has not been discredited - there was no ‘email scandal’.

So let’s cut the bullshit and get over the anti-global warming alarmists.

The Real ClimateGate, Part 1: Getting over the non-existent 'climate email' fiasco

2010-09-29T17:40:00.006Z

Over the last few weeks, in the run-up to the official UK release of my new book A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization on 4^th October, I’ve been inundated with angry and often exasperated claims that one of the key crises I address in the book – human-induced climate change – is merely a myth, lacks serious scientific evidence, and/or is the sinister result of deliberate ‘scare-mongering.’

My experience is that public opinion is now seriously confused about the science of climate change, and that increasingly people either feel they fall into an agnostic camp, or categorize themselves as wholesale ‘sceptics’. Recent polls of American public opinion in August found that as much as 45 per cent of people believe that global warming “is caused by long-term planetary trends”, while only 40 per cent are convinced that “human activity is the main contributor.” In the UK, the number of people who believe climate change is “definitely” a reality dropped by a massive 30 per cent over the preceding year, from 44 to 31 per cent.

There’s no doubt that this has been a direct result of a series of scandalous stories which received worldwide press coverage, starting with the leaked emails from the climate science unit at the University of East Anglia, and finishing with a whole range of claims attempting to discredit the IPCC’s landmark Fourth Assessment Report published in early 2007, which confirmed a 90 per cent certainty that current global warming was due to human-induced fossil fuel emissions.

One of the purposes of writing my book was precisely to explore the so-called ‘sceptic-alarmist’ debates – across a whole range of global crises, not just climate change – to get at the truth of the matter. The sheer repetitive nature of the misconceptions has led me to decide to deal with them systematically here.

One of the earliest and loudest self-styled ‘sceptics’ of anthropogenic global warming is Senator James Inhofe, the ranking minority member of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. In late 2007, Inhofe released a list of over 400 “prominent scientists” who “disputed man-made global warming claims.” By 2009, Inhofe had expanded his list to just under 700 people. The Inhofe list has been regularly cited by climate sceptics as evidence that there is no scientific consensus on climate change, and that most scientists actually challenge the idea that global warming is human-induced.

I discuss Inhofe’s fraudulent list at some length in the book, but it suffices here to note that a thorough study of the curiously ever-expanding Inhofe list was completed in summer 2009 by the Center for Inquiry in the US. Among other things, the study found that fewer than 10 per cent of the people on Inhofe’s list could be identified as climate scientists; that a further 4 per cent actually favoured the IPCC consensus on anthropogenic global warming; and that 80 per cent of the list had no peer-reviewed publications related to climate science.

The Inhofe list was widely publicized by the media – even though, as of the end of 2009, Senator Inhofe has received at least a million dollars in campaign contributions from individuals and companies linked to the US oil and gas industry. This should not come as a surprise.

In the period from January 2009 to June 2010, the world’s top 35 companies and trade associations linked to fossil fuels, mining and electric utility companies invested more than $500 million “in lobbying and campaign contributions... to defeat clean energy legislation”, successfully convincing enough US senators to oppose energy reforms. The lobbyists included the usual ‘special interest’ players: ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, BP, Koch Industries and Shell. This is nothing new. Oil tycoons at Koch gave a total of $50 million to climate ‘sceptic’ front groups from 1998 to 2007. ExxonMobil gave $16 million to similar groups in around the same period to support their activities, and have been exposed again this July, giving $1 million this year to “organisations that campaign against controls on greenhouse gas emissions” – including several groups which led attacks on climate scientists at the University of East Anglia. These are all simply isolated cases that are part of a wider ongoing campaign by the fossil fuel industries to promulgate disinformation and confusion about climate change, so as to consolidate their own control over the global political economy.

It is not a surprise then that Inhofe himself was among the first to jump on the 2009 climate email ‘scandal’ bandwagon, when thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit from a period of more than ten years were obtained by hackers. One of the emails most cited by ‘sceptics’, by the head of the unit, Professor Phil Jones, reads: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline”.

Inhofe’s press blog commented that the email “appears to show several scientists eager to present a particular viewpoint – that anthropogenic emissions are largely responsible for global warming – even when the data showed something different”.

But the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), analyzing this and other leaked emails, explained the language and scientific context in detail:

“Jones is talking about how scientists compare temperature data from thermometers with temperature data derived from tree rings. Comparing that data allows scientists to derive past temperature data for several centuries before accurate thermometer measurements were available. The global average surface temperature since 1880 is based on thermometer and satellite temperature measurements...

In some parts of the world, tree rings are a good substitute for temperature record. Trees form a ring of new growth every growing season. Generally, warmer temperatures produce thicker tree rings, while colder temperatures produce thinner ones. Other factors, such as precipitation, soil properties, and the tree’s age also can affect tree ring growth.

The ‘trick,’ which was used in a paper published in 1998 in the science journal Nature, is to combine the older tree ring data with thermometer data. Combining the two data sets can be difficult, and scientists are always interested in new ways to make temperature records more accurate.

Tree rings are a largely consistent source of data for the past 2,000 years. But since the 1960s, scientists have noticed there are a handful of tree species in certain areas that appear to indicate temperatures that are warmer or colder than we actually know they are from direct thermometer measurement at weather stations.

‘Hiding the decline’ in this email refers to omitting data from some Siberian trees after 1960. This omission was openly discussed in the latest climate science update in 2007 from the IPCC, so it is not ‘hidden’ at all.

Why Siberian trees? In the Yamal region of Siberia, there is a small set of trees with rings that are thinner than expected after 1960 when compared with actual thermometer measurements there. Scientists are still trying to figure out why these trees are outliers. Some analyses have left out the data from these trees after 1960 and have used thermometer temperatures instead. Techniques like this help scientists reconstruct past climate temperature records based on the best available data.”

Another email from scientist Kevin Trenberth laments that “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment”, describing this as a “travesty” due to the fact that “Our observing system is inadequate”.

UCS points out that he is talking about short-term internal climate variability, in particular the year 2008 “which was cooler than scientists expected, but still among the 10 warmest years on record.”

Yet another email by Jones, construed by ‘sceptics’ as evidence of scientists manipulating peer review to squeeze out legitimate climate dissenters, objects to a paper on solar variability in the climate published in Climate Research, and calls for scientists to boycott the journal until it effects a change in editorship. Yet as UCS clarifies:

“Half of the editorial board of Climate Research resigned in protest against what they felt was a failure of the peer review process. The paper, which argued that current warming was unexceptional, was disputed by scientists whose work was cited in the paper. Many subsequent publications set the record straight, which demonstrates how the peer review process over time tends to correct such lapses. Scientists later discovered that the paper was funded by the American Petroleum Institute.”

Thus, UCS rightly concluded that whoever stole the emails “could only produce a handful of messages that, when taken out of context, might seem suspicious to people who are not familiar with the intimate details of climate science.”

The idea that these emails constitute evidence of a ‘scientific conspiracy’ to engineer evidence to support a fraudulent theory of man-made global warming is, in this context, preposterous.

No wonder then that three separate independent inquiries into the whole University of East Anglia email fiasco have unequivocally and thoroughly cleared the climate scientists of any wrong-doing or deception, vindicated the integrity of the scientific methods and evidence they used, and re-instated them back into their jobs. The parliamentary science and technology select committee, a university-commissioned independent inquiry by Lord Oxburgh (a former chair of that committee), and finally a comprehensive six-month Independent Review chaired by Sir Muir Russell, all concluded that the so-called ‘scandal’ was a non-entity, and confirmed the “rigour and honesty” of the scientists involved. Pretty much the most they criticized the scientists for was for being “unhelpful and defensive” in communication with people requesting information.

About the only people who insisted on questioning these findings as part of a ‘whitewash’ were Lord Nigel Lawson and friends from the fossil fuel industry-connected Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). Lawson himself chairs and holds shares in the Central European Trust, whose clients include oil and gas lobby giants like BP Amaco, the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Texaco. Of course, the fact that the GWPF shares offices with the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, which in turn shares employees from BP, is nothing more than a coincidence.

So please, dear ‘sceptics’. Stop regurgitating dead ‘news’, which we now know to be false.

Prospect Magazine on my new book - 'Is the end of the world such a bad thing?'

2010-09-27T15:37:00.004Z

Marianne Brown from Prospect Magazine has just posted a blog at the Prospect website reviewing the fantastic and disturbing new play by Steve Bloomer, 'Boiling Frogs', currently showing at Southwark Playhouse. Last Thursday I was invited to speak at the post-show discussion, where I talked about some of the findings of my new book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save it, and clarified the implications of global systemic crises for understanding the rise of 'police-state politics' - all of which takes up a whole chapter in the book itself.

Steve's play is well-worth watching, capturing the moral complexities of the ongoing debate about liberty vs security, but offering an overall hard-hitting portrayal of what the erosion of the former in the name of the latter has meant, and could mean, for our societies.

Here are the key excerpts about my book:

[...]

Politicial scientist Dr Nafeez Ahmed makes a similar connection between denial and complicity in his book A user’s guide to the crisis of civilization. In a post-play discussion at the theatre, Ahmed outlined why he thinks different global phenomena, particularly climate change, are contributing to the making of a police state. The crisis, Ahmed argues, is systematic, but our tendency to ‘otherise’ cultures means we do not look into ourselves for the source of the problem. Rather, we reinforce our society by belittling these ‘others’ we define against ourselves as inferior. Underpinning this is the belief that governments are there to protect us.

Civilisation in its current form won’t exist beyond the 21^st century, he argues, because oil exploitation will have reached its peak (something he suggests may have happened already), whilst rising global temperatures and overpopulation in developing countries could threaten the security of developed nations. What’s more, attempting to “democratise” threatening states has not tackled the problem. What we’re doing in Iraq and Afghanistan hasn’t made the world a safer place.

A “business as usual” attitude doesn’t address the issue, he says, because change is inevitable. Only 500 generations ago, humans were just beginning to evolve from hunter-gatherers to crop cultivators. Ahmed’s monologue was met by some disdain from the audience who questioned his outlook as unnecessarily pessimistic and scaremongering. It doesn’t have to be pessimistic, he replied, but the model has to be changed.

[...]

Read the rest here

Sliding toward Climate Catastrophe - Danger of Gulf Stream Collapse

2010-09-21T15:58:00.004Z

Various abridged versions of this piece have been published in Le Monde diplomatique, Daily News Egypt and Pakistan Observer.

Unprecedented heatwave in Russia, leading to uncontrollable wildfires. Floods in Pakistan the like of which have not been seen in centuries. The breaking up of the Greenland ice-sheet. The coincidence and severity of such natural disasters in recent months has prompted renewed debate about the role of global warming, and whether such crises are merely a foretaste of things to come.

Scientists emphasise that there is no hard data directly linking these recent disasters to specific changes in the earth’s climate due to human interference. But they also warn that such crises fit unnervingly well into scientific projections that higher global average temperatures will increase the frequency of extreme weather events worldwide.

So while we cannot be absolutely certain that recent events are due solely or mostly to global warming, we can be sure that if we continue our relentless dependence on fossil fuels, these sorts of extreme weather events will become more frequent, more intense, and more disruptive.

Already, global warming has exacerbated droughts and led to declines in agricultural productivity over the last decade, including a 10-20 per cent drop in rice yields. The percentage of land stricken by drought doubled from 15 to 30 per cent between 1975 and 2000. If trends continue, by 2025, 1.8 billion people would be living in regions of water-scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could be subject to water stress. By 2050, scientists project that world crop yields could fall as much as 20-40 per cent.

Unfortunately, our window of opportunity to turn things around is closing fast. Global average temperatures have already risen by 0.7C in the last 130 years. In 2007, the UN Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told the world that at current rates of increase of fossil fuel emissions, we were heading toward a rise in global average temperatures of around 6C by the end of this century – leading to “mass extinctions” on a virtually uninhabitable planet.

But things are getting worse, even faster than we had previously imagined. Currently, governments talk about stabilising global average temperatures below 2C, at an atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases at 450 parts per million (ppm). But according to Dr. James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the upper limit for a safe climate is far lower, at around 350 parts per million (ppm). If we go beyond this for a prolonged period, we would trigger a global average temperature rise of over 1C, whose results, says Hansen, would be “guaranteed disaster.”

The problem is that even the 350 ppm limit could be far too conservative. Professor John Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a coordinating lead author for the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, warns that a safe level of emissions is well below 330 ppm – more likely between 280 and 300 ppm.

With the earth already beyond 300 ppm, we are now heading for a minimum rise of 2C this century, if not worse. Many scientists concede that without drastic emissions reductions, we are on the path toward a 4C rise as early as mid-century, with catastrophic consequences. Worse, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley now project that at current rates of fossil fuel emissions, we are on course to reach global temperatures of up to 8C within 90 years – even worse than the IPCC’s worst-scale apocalyptic scenario.

They account for the effects of ‘positive-feedbacks’ not factored in to previous studies – that is, the fact that the collapse of any one of these ecosystem hotspots could have a domino effect on the whole earth climate system. Global warming impacts in one ecosystem could feedback into other ecosystems, with the danger of tipping the climate over into a process of exponential, runaway warming. These ‘positive-feedbacks’ mean that as temperatures rise, the capacity of the earth to naturally absorb human fossil emissions increases, multiplying the warming effect.

Thus, without drastically dropping carbon emissions to zero by 2020, we are in danger of triggering dangerous climatic changes that could lead to the irreversible collapses of key interdependent ecosystems, including the loss of the world’s coral reefs; the disappearance of major mountain glaciers; the total loss of the Arctic summer sea-ice, most of the Greenland ice-sheet and the break-up of West Antarctica; acidification and overheating of the oceans; the collapse of the Amazon rainforest; and the loss of Arctic permafrost; to name just a few.

For instance, global warming has already accelerated the melt of Arctic permafrost, releasing methane into the atmosphere. Methane is twenty times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Above 1C, this process of melting and methane release would be further accelerated, raising temperatures higher, thus releasing more methane, and so on, in an escalating cycle. According to former US Energy Department geologist John Atcheson, “Once triggered, this cycle could result in runaway global warming the likes of which even the most pessimistic doomsayers aren’t talking about. If we trigger this runaway release of methane, there’s no turning back. No do-overs. Once it starts, it’s likely to play out all the way.”

Other examples abound. At higher temperatures, plant matter in the soil breaks down faster, releasing stores of carbon into the atmosphere, again multiplying warming, and so on. There is some 300 times as much carbon trapped in the soils as is released each year from burning fossil fuels. Warming is also endangering the tropical forests of the Amazon, the Congo and Borneo, due to decreased rainfall. This is already leading to the collapse of trees, causing them to release their stored carbon. The Amazon alone contains 90 billion tonnes of carbon, enough to increase the rate of warming by 50 per cent. Scientist Daniel Nepstad projects that the combination of warming, deforestation, logging and fires could reduce the Amazon by 55 per cent by 2030, which alone could raise temperatures by another 1.5C.

One of the most disturbing developments is in the Arctic, where summer sea-ice is rapidly disappearing year-on-year. Among other effects, freshwater from the ice-melt as well as increased regional rain and snow (as ice cover retreats, more moisture from the ocean surface evaporates) could dump enough freshwater into the North Atlantic to interfere with – and perhaps even stop – the Gulf Stream, a strong ocean current which brings warmth to Western Europe. Scientists have warned that the Arctic could see an ice-free summer as early as 2012.

The slow-down or collapse of the Gulf Stream would kick-start abrupt, dangerous and irreversible climate changes, leading to drastic cooling in North America and Western Europe, and frequent droughts in food-basket regions. According to Michael Schlesinger, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Absent any climate policy, scientists have found a 70 percent chance of shutting down the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean over the next 200 years, with a 45 percent probability of this occurring in this century.”

Most disturbingly, the environmental disaster stoked by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may have amplified this probability. Dr. Gianluigi Zangari, a theoretical physicist at the Frascati National Laboratory (LNF) in Italy, has analysed satellite data-maps from May-June, which confirm “for the first time direct evidence of the rapid breaking of the Loop Current, a warm ocean current, crucial part of the Gulf Stream”, in an area adjacent to BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform. Zangari concludes that it is “plausible to correlate the breaking of the Loop Current with the biochemical and physical action of the BP Oil Spill on the Gulf Stream”, which may “generate a chain reaction of unpredictable critical phenomena and instabilities” in the global climate.

The instability in the Gulf Stream – whose pathway directly affects weather and climate patterns over the whole northern hemisphere and indeed the world – may well be linked to the erratic behaviour of the polar jet stream, whose blocking appears to be partially responsible for the extreme weather in Russia, Pakistan and elsewhere, including forest fires in Portugal, flooding in China, and a heatwave in the US Midwest.

In summary, the window of opportunity to prevent disaster is closing fast. Conventional discourse on climate change tends to underestimate the gravity of what current trends actually imply – not merely an inconvenient and growing disruption to our lives, but at worst, a permanent rupture between humankind and the natural world, which threatens not only the continuity of industrial civilization as we know it, but also the survival of our species.

Climate change is already affecting some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people – in a cruel irony those who contributed least to global warming are suffering first and worst. International agency Oxfam estimates that by 2015 the average number of people affected each year by climate-related disasters could increase by over 50 percent to 375 million. The recent floods in Pakistan show the potential for human suffering that lurks behind the statistics.

The scale of the potential catastrophe round the corner – not to mention the scale of our seeming systemic inability or unwillingness to respond to it proportionally – indicates that the climate crisis cannot be dealt with merely by tweaking the global system here and there to do things in a slightly more ‘green’ fashion. There is something deeply wrong with our global political economy, given its obsessive compulsion to ‘grow’ and accumulate without recognition of natural or social limits; with our values, which privilege money-maximization and consumerism to the degree that we are exhausting the earth’s resources beyond repair; and with our understanding of human nature, when the wealthiest societies are simultaneously the most unequal and unhappy.

If we are to overcome this crisis, we will need not only to act preventively and adapt strategically, but to transform the regressive political, economic and social structures that continue to accelerate ecological collapse. This process can only truly begin when a critical mass of people recognize that imminent climate catastrophe is symptomatic of deep-seated problems in the way industrial civilization is currently organized.

Understanding Islamophobia - in the context of global systemic crisis

2010-09-15T09:17:00.005Z

New Left Project (NLP), the innovative new website which above all aims to lift the level of progressive discourse and analysis, has just published the transcript of my lengthy interview with NLP's Samia Aziz on the nature, causes and future of Islamophobia in the UK and the world.

The conversation was quite wide-ranging, and included a detailed discussion of key issues such as the disproportionate marginalization of Muslim communities from mainstream social, cultural, economic, and political structures; questions surrounding immigration; anti-terror laws and securitization; and the wider systemic context of Islamophobia, including the global economic recession, the unequalizing structure of neoliberal capitalism, as well as the convergence of ecological and energy crises of which the recession is ultimately merely an early warning sign. We also discussed some of the counterproductive responses internal to Muslim communities themselves.

Overall, the interview sets out one of the key arguments of my new book, that the so-called 'Clash of Civilizations' is not an objective condition of international relations - rather, it is a construct, an ideological framework, projected precisely in response to the acceleration of the protracted, systemic collapse of the neoliberal global political economy that is now well underway. And the danger is that as this process of acceleration continues, we may see an increasing legitimization of far-right politics, 'Otherization' and political violence which already contains logics that appear tendentially genocidal.

[...]

The term ‘Islamophobia’ has only become part of common political vocabulary in the last two decades. First of all, can you tell us what this word means?

Islamaphobia refers to a state of mind or a set of beliefs which characterise Muslims in a regressive and derogatory way, resulting in them being discriminated against. That’s putting it very simply. First of all, it’s the targeting of Muslims as a specific group. Furthermore, it’s a set of ideas about them, which are usually mistaken, inaccurate and can be harmful. These then lead to forms of behaviour which are discriminatory in the social, political, economic and cultural realms, manifesting itself in a number of ways.

In what ways does Islamophobia manifest itself?

Islamophobia can manifest itself in lots of ways. Firstly, there are latent, institutional ways, which are sometimes difficult to detect. These can be seen in economic statistics about the conditions of Muslims. Approximately 69% of South Asian Muslims live in poverty in Britain, which is undoubtedly an extraordinary figure. It is the result of inequitable social structures, which don’t just affect Muslims, but affect a number of communities, such as the white working class, and asylum seekers. This significant figure is not something that can be put down to conspiracy. In Western societies particular ethnic communities tend to face the brunt of these inequitable structures, and are thus marginalized. It is commonly referred to as institutional discrimination. Even though as a society we have renounced racism, we still find large sections of the ethnic minority populations being socially excluded as they lack access to the same goods and services that other members of society do.

Read the rest here.

Pakistan and America: costs of militarism

2010-09-09T10:55:00.002Z

As published in OpenDemocracy.net

Pakistan is in the eye of many storms. It lies at the heart of the United States’s almost decade-long “war on terror”, with an ever-ambiguous position (in Washington’s view) as an unreliable and perhaps even renegade ally. It is a society riven by enormous social inequalities and deep political, religious and ethnic divisions. It is frequently hit by acts of pitiless violence, from the targeting by religious extremists of members of rival faiths to “drone attacks” by US forceswhich kill innocent civilians.

Now, it is now battered by catastrophic floods which have destroyed the livelihoods of millions of the country’s people, threatening even greater humanitarian disasters to come. The United Nations reported on 7 September 2010 that as many as 10 million people have been living entirely without shelter for six weeks. And even in sport there is no release, for players in the national cricket team are charged with taking money in return for aiding a betting-scam by altering their on-field behaviour.

This mix of political crisis, natural tragedy and everyday corruption is itself an indication of how intractable Pakistan’s problems are. What is also clear is that the most serious of these problems go to the very top, and relate to the nature of the state and its institutions (not least its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] agency). If there is a way forward for Pakistan, a path beyond violence and extremism, it surely lies in addressing how these institutions operate - in particular, how the years of war in Afghanistan and its spillover effects in Pakistan have entrenched militarism and strengthened those forces in Pakistan most beyond democratic control.

To read more visit OpenDemocracy.net

Abiogenesis Oil Myth Still Inexplicably Hanging Around

2010-09-08T11:59:00.005Z

One of the issues I dealt with in my new book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization, was the abiogenesis oil theory, which has often been used by critics of 'peak oil' arguments to suggest (I'm oversimplifying now) that oil is mineral in origin, and is continuously self-replenishing.

The truth is that the way self-styled 'peak oil' sceptics use abiogenesis theory is actually quite far apart from the way its main proponents, such as Thomas Gold, did so - who implicitly acknowledged that even if the theory were true, it wouldn't really avert peak oil in practicality. Putting it simply, we would all be swimming in oil if the 'strong' proponents of abiogenesis were right - that oil self-replenished on such a massive continuous scale, it would be enough to avert peak oil. As that's not the case, the theory is simply irrelevant.

I just came across this ridiculous, hysterical article at the misnamed "Climate Realists" regurgitating much of the same absurdities about abiogenesis oil theory. There are many decent websites which show how the peer-reviewed scientific literature refutes the claims made on sites like these. One I'd recommend is Skeptical Science, which is basically an excellent resource, and came in handy when tracking down some of the most prominent 'sceptic' arguments that I systematically refuted in my book.

The article's stale argument is that Russia is experiencing a massive oil bonanza because they're the only ones that recognize the deep 'truth' of abiogenesis oil generation and therefore have been able to exploit this special knowledge that our own Western oil industries "sinisterly" deny.

This is the comment I posted in response:

"Yes, the Russians have thousands of so-called peer-reviewed papers all proving that peak oil is a myth.

That's why Russian oil production peaked in 2008 according to Leonid Fedun, vice-president of LUKOIL, Russia's largest independent oil company.

That's also why Viktor Khristenko, Russia's energy minister admits that the future of Russian production looks like "plateau, stagnation."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/282adfd4-0a4c-11dd-b5b1-0000779fd2ac.html

The idea of "realism" on this website clearly equates to neurotic naval-gazing."

I really don't have time for this sort of thing, but I just couldn't help myself. If you want to have a more detailed analysis, do check out the book.

The End of the World As We Know it? ... and the rise of the Post-Carbon era ...

2010-09-06T14:53:00.003Z

Published in Ceasefire Magazine:

Only 500 generations ago, hunter-gatherers began cultivating crops and forming their tiny communities into social hierarchies. Around 15 to 20 generations ago, industrial capitalism erupted on a global scale.

In the last generation, the entire human species, along with virtually all other species and indeed the entire planet, have been thrown into a series of crises, which many believe threaten to converge in global catastrophe: global warming spiraling out of control; oil prices fluctuating wildly; food riots breaking out in the South; banks collapsing worldwide; the spectre of terror bombings in major cities; and the promise of ‘endless war’ to fight ‘violent extremists’ at home and abroad.

We are running out of time. Without urgent mitigating, preventive and transformative action, these global crises are likely to converge and mutually accelerate over the coming decades. By 2018, converging food, water and energy shortages could magnify the probability of conflict between major powers, civil wars, and cross-border conflicts. After 2020, this could result in political and economic catastrophes that would undermine state control and national infrastructures, potentially leading to social collapse.

Anthropogenic global warming alone illustrates the gravity of our predicament. Global average temperatures have already risen by 0.7C in the last 130 years. In 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told the world that at current rates of increase of fossil fuel emissions, we were heading toward a rise in global average temperatures of around 6C by the end of this century, leading to mass extinctions on a virtually uninhabitable planet. The Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences has reported that current fossil fuel emissions are exceeding this worst-case scenario.

Many scientists concede that without drastic emissions reductions by 2020, we are on the path toward a 4C rise as early as mid-century, with catastrophic consequences, including the loss of the world’s coral reefs; the disappearance of major mountain glaciers; the total loss of the Arctic summer sea-ice, most of the Greenland ice-sheet and the break-up of West Antarctica; acidification and overheating of the oceans; the collapse of the Amazon rainforest; and the loss of Arctic permafrost; to name just a few. Each of these ecosystem collapses could trigger an out-of-control runaway warming process. Worse, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley now project that we are actually on course to reach global temperatures of up to 8C within 90 years.

But our over-dependence on fossil fuels is also counterproductive even on its own terms. Increasing evidence demonstrates that peak oil is at hand. This is when world oil production reaches its maximum level at the point when half the world’s reserves of cheap oil have been depleted, after which it becomes geophysically increasingly difficult to extract it. This means that passed the half-way point, world production can never reach its maximum level again, and thus continuously declines until reserves are depleted. Until 2004, world oil production had risen continuously but thereafter underwent a plateau all the way through to 2008. Then from July to August 2008, world oil production fell by almost one million barrels per day. It’s still decreasing, even according to BP’s Statistical Review 2010 (which every year pretends that peak oil won’t happen for another 40 years) – in 2009 world oil production was 2.6 percent below that in 2008, and is now below 2004 levels.

Oil price volatility due to peak oil was a major factor that induced the 2008 economic recession. The collapse of the mortgage house of cards was triggered by the post-peak oil price shocks, which escalated costs of living and led to a cascade of debt-defaults. A study by US economist James Hamilton confirmed there would have been no recession without the oil price shocks. While the recession slumped demand, allowing oil prices to reduce, experts now warn of a coming oil supply crunch by around 2014. As climate change intensifies natural disasters – such as droughts in food-basket regions, floods in South Asia and the heatwave in Russia – and as the full impact of peak oil eventually hits, costs to national economies will rocket, while world food production declines.

Maps released by scientists at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), University of Wisconsin-Madison, show that the earth is “rapidly running out of fertile land” for further agricultural development. No wonder, then, that world agricultural land productivity between 1990 and 2007 was 1.2 per cent per year, nearly half compared to 1950-90 levels of 2.1 per cent. Similarly, world grain consumption exceeded production for seven of eight years prior to 2008.

Apart from climate change, the ecological cost of industrial methods is fast eroding the soil – in the US, for instance, 30 times faster than the natural rate. Former prairie lands have lost one half of their top soil over about a 100 years of farming – but it takes 500 years to replace just one-inch. Erosion is now reducing productivity by up to 65 per cent a year. The dependence of industrial agriculture on hydrocarbon energy sources – with ten calories of fossil fuel energy needed to produce just one calorie of food – means that the impact of peak oil after 2014 will hugely constrain future world agricultural production.

But oil is not the only problem. Numerous studies show that hydrocarbon resources will become increasingly depleted by mid-century, and by the end of this century will be so scarce as to be useless – although we do have enough to potentially tip us over into irreversible runaway global warming.

Former TOTAL geologist Jean Laharrere projects that world natural gas production will peak by around 2025. New technologies mean that unconventional forms of natural gas in the US might prolong this some decades, but only if future demand doesn’t increase. The independent Energy Watch Group (EGW) in Berlin projects that world coal production will also peak in 2025, but the journal Science finds that this could occur “close to the year 2011.” EGW also argues that world production of uranium for nuclear energy will peak in 2035. According to the Hydrocarbon Depletion Study Group at Uppsala University, unconventional oil – such as oil shale and tar sands –will be incapable of averting peak oil. Greater attention has turned to thorium, which certainly holds greater promise than uranium, but as pointed out by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Washington DC, thorium still requires uranium to “kick-start” a nuclear chain reaction, and as yet no viable commercial reactors have been built despite decades of research.

The exponential expansion of modern industrial civilization over the last couple of centuries, and the liberal ideology of ‘unlimited growth’ that has accompanied it, has been tied indelibly to 1) the seemingly unlimited supply of energy provided by nature’s fossil fuel reserves and 2) humankind’s willingness to over-exploit our environment with no recognition of boundaries or constraints. But the 21^st century is the age of irreversible hydrocarbon energy depletion – the implication being that industrial civilization, in its current form, cannot last beyond this century.

This means that this century signals not only the end of the carbon age, but the beginning of a new post-carbon era. Therefore, this century should be understood as an age of civilizational transition – the preceding crises are interlocking symptoms of a global political economy, ideology and value-system which is no longer sustainable, which is crumbling under its own weight, and which over the next few decades will be recognized as obsolete. The question that remains, of course, is what will take its place?

While we may not be able to stop various catastrophes and collapse-processes from occurring, we still retain an unprecedented opportunity to envisage an alternative vision for a new, sustainable and equitable form of post-carbon civilization. The imperative now is for communities, activists, scholars and policymakers to initiate dialogue on the contours of this vision, and pathways to it. Any vision for ‘another world’, if it is to overcome the deep-rooted structural failures of our current business-as-usual model, will need to explore how we can develop new social, political and economic structures which encourage the following:

Widespread distribution of ownership of productive resources so that all members of society have a stake in agricultural, industrial and commercial productive enterprises, rather than a tiny minority monopolising resources for their own interests
More decentralised politico-economic participation through self-managerial producer and consumer councils to facilitate participatory decision-making in economic enterprises
Re-defining the meaning of economic growth to focus less on materially-focused GDP, and more on the capacity to deliver values such as health, education, well-being, longevity, political and cultural freedom
Fostering a new, distributed renewable energy infrastructure based on successful models such as that of the borough of Woking in Surrey, UK
Structural reform of the monetary, banking and financial system including abolition of interest, in particular the cessation of money-creation through government borrowing on compound interest
Elimination of unrestricted lending system based on faulty quantitative risk-assessment models, with mechanisms to facilitate greater regulation of lending practices by bank depositors themselves
Development of parallel grassroots participatory political structures that are both transnational and community-oriented, by which to facilitate community governance as well as greater popular involvement in mainstream political institutions
Development of parallel grassroots participatory economic institutions that are both transnational and community-oriented, to facilitate emergence of alternative equitable media of exchange and loans between North and South
Emergence of a ‘post-materialist’ scientific paradigm and worldview which recognizes that the cutting-edge insights of physics and biology undermine traditional, mechanistic conceptions of the natural order, pointing to a more holistic understanding of life and nature
Emergence of a ‘post-materialist’ ethic recognizing that progressive values and ideals such as justice, compassion, and generosity are more conducive to the survival of the human species, and thus more in harmony with the natural order, than the conventional ‘materialistic’ behaviours associated with neoliberal consumerism

What the Pakistan Floods Mean for the 'War on Terror' - and why military solutions are bring their own defeat

2010-09-06T14:50:00.004Z

Published in Tehran Times:

The monsoon flooding in Pakistan is an unprecedented humanitarian disaster larger in scale than previous disasters such as Katrina or the Asian Tsunami. No wonder then that it has perhaps rightly eclipsed the import of the WikiLeaks disclosure of classified US military intelligence on operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those 90,000 pages released in July were merely the latest in a series of reports alleging the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence’s (ISI) ongoing support for Islamist militant networks.

Also forgotten is British Prime Minister David Cameron’s pre-flood condemnation of Pakistan’s “export of terror”. But then, this is not entirely surprising given that only a month earlier, British Foreign Secretary William Hague had praised Pakistani Army chief General Kayani’s efforts to combat extremism, emphasising the significance of Britain’s long-term strategic and economic relationship with Pakistan.

The danger is that while the humanitarian catastrophe in Pakistan grabs the world’s attention, the long-term consequences for regional security have been largely overlooked. Zardari’s visit to the UK to confront Cameron’s allegations in the early stages of the flooding – despite 4 million Pakistanis affected at the time – was heavily criticised for exemplifying a lack of genuine concern for the plight of his people, compared to his greater willingness to engage in international PR. Now up to 20 million people are suffering from the impact of the floods, little has changed.

To this day, Zardari’s administration has provided virtually no effective support to the flood victims, while Taliban-affiliated militants have rushed to set-up relief camps. State inaction fuels already rampant socio-political grievances. But the floods have only exacerbated an already dire situation, in which the Pakistani government’s unwillingness or inability to cater for the needs of its people has fuelled grassroots resentment that, in turn, has ramped up support for Islamist groups. Government corruption, rife under Musharraf and growing under Zardari, has for long meant that impoverished Pakistanis frequently have little choice but to turn to Islamist groups who set up madrassas for free, establish medical camps and even provide generators. In summary, the militants are filling the social vacuum left by an ineffective and corrupt state – and the floods, as Zardari himself has recently conceded, are making it worse.

A similar process is underway in Afghanistan under NATO-tutelage, where the focus on military solutions at the expense of infrastructure-development fuels the insurgency. In the summer 2009 edition of Military Review, Afghan war veteran and senior NATO official Lt. Col. Thomas Brouns warned that “the possibility of strategic defeat looms” as “violent incidents” increase in direct proportion to the NATO troop surge. This is compounded by the failure of many investments to reach poverty-stricken rural areas, further encouraging insurgent recruitment. Afghans “need to see delivery on promises of improved security” as well as improvements in their personal situation, for lasting stability to be achieved.

In this context, the WikiLeaks revelations confirm that NATO’s unconditional military support for Pakistan has almost certainly subsidized the 90 percent increase in violence in Afghanistan over the past year. Although the US response has been quite different to the British - with Vice President Joe Biden vehemently insisting that the leaks predate the current administration’s policy – official disclaimers were contradicted early on by anonymous US officials interviewed by the New York Times, who confirmed that the portrayal of the ISI’s “collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence.” The documents show that the ISI has “acted as both ally and enemy”, appeasing certain American demands for cooperation while exerting influence in Afghanistan.

More disturbing is that the WikiLeaks ‘revelations’ offer nothing new – US military intelligence has been fully cognizant of Pakistan’s sponsorship of Islamist extremist networks for several decades. This is revealed by two declassified US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reports, dated two weeks after 9/11, released in September 2003, which observed that bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network was “able to expand under the safe sanctuary extended by Taliban following Pakistan directives” and funded by the ISI.

Confidential NATO reports and US intelligence assessments circulated to White House officials in 2008 documented consistent ISI support for Taliban insurgents. As head of the ISI from 2004–2007, Gen. Kayani presided over Taliban training camps in Balochistan and provided over 2,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 400,000 rounds of ammunition. In 2008, US intelligence intercepted Kayani’s description of senior insurgent leader, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, as a “strategic asset” in the insurgency around Kabul and eastern Afghanistan.

The British have never been in the dark either. In 2006, a leaked report by the Ministry of Defence-run think-tank, the Defence Academy, spelled out the ISI’s “dual role in combating terrorism” while simultaneously “supporting the Taliban [and] supporting terrorism and extremism.”

The evidence is hardly commensurate with the official position (that ISI support for the Taliban is a rogue operation by isolated ‘elements’), instead implicating the highest levels of Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies – including Kayani. Yet last August Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued that Kayani was committed to purging the ISI to end its support for militant networks. He and other Obama officials persuaded US Congress to commit to an unconditional five-year package of $6 billion in military and economic assistance to Pakistan. As long as Pakistan’s security mandarins believe that NATO is dependent on them to win the war in Afghanistan, they will expand regional strategic influence through exploitation and diversion of aid to militant groups, who continue to operate with impunity.

The contradictory nature of US-UK policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan has created speculation that US regional war aims obscure the wider geopolitical objectives of the ‘War on Terror’. Ola Tunander of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, in a confidential report to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, argued that the US strategy in Afghanistan is to deliberately “support both sides” in order to “calibrate the level of violence.” The broader agenda is to mobilize other governments to support US global policy, thus legitimizing the US-dominated unipolar order. The perpetuation of a state of permanent global warfare is not merely directed against a local insurgent or anti-American ruler, but against “the economic-political multipolar power structure” that would give Europe, China and Japan a significant world standing.

Whatever the case, David Cameron’s pre-flood outburst – albeit an interesting departure from Britain’s past record of ignoring ISI duplicity – achieves little, as does the Obama administration’s growing willingness to talk to the Taliban. Negotiations should not be off the table, but they are not the solution, particularly if diplomacy is seen as a last resort adopted to avoid a prospective military failure in Afghanistan. President Obama should recall that a power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban was also previously explored by the preceding Bush administration in hopes of establishing sufficient stability for a trans-Afghan gas pipeline. At that time, the Taliban rejected the federal proposal – but if it accepted now, would this not provide militants an unprecedented platform of legitimacy to operate with regional impunity?

NATO should not jettison diplomacy, but far more is needed – namely, serious joint US-UK action to make military and economic aid to Pakistan conditional on the cessation of support to Islamist insurgent networks, undercutting their principal source of financial and logistical support in Pakistan; and a draw-down of NATO forces in Afghanistan to reverse the direct correlation between the troop surge and the escalation of insurgent violence.

Does this mean that humanitarian and development aid to Pakistan should be stopped? Not by any means. On the contrary, it is clear that the lack of sufficient official support to disenfranchised communities has been deeply counterproductive. NATO allies need to focus on the root causes by which militants have been able to recruit from these communities. This requires diverting aid from military to humanitarian, development and infrastructure projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly by supporting the work of credible independent NGOs in the region. Such efforts must be re-doubled in the wake of the accelerating flood devastation, which could empower militants unless we act now. Such a strategic shift focusing on welfare at the grassroots level would strike a decisive blow against Taliban recruitment efforts without firing a single bullet – signalling to the ISI that the game has truly changed.

World Food Production Crisis - Worsening

2010-08-10T15:04:00.006Z

New research published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that rice yields in many parts of Asia over the last 25 years have fallen already by about 10-20 per cent due to the impact of global warming. There is no doubt that this steady decline has played a key role in the extraordinary fall in agricultural productivity across the less developed world over the last decade, as compared to the years of the industrial 'Green revolution' of the 1950s-80s.

Studies reviewed in A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization project that such declines will increase on a business-as-usual model of escalating rates of increase of fossil fuel emissions, with some projections suggesting that grain production could fall by as much as 20-40 per cent by 2050 in major food-basket regions.

Industrial agriculture is of course fundamentally dependent on hydrocarbon energy, both in terms of the oil necessary to fuel machinery, as well in terms of its integral role in making pesticides and fertilizers. With the peak of world oil production most likely at hand, leading to a global supply crunch around 2014, industrial agriculture will also increasingly face the constraint from diminishing resources, further endangering world food production.

This is why I've predicted that despite fluctuations, overall, prices for staple foods are likely to undergo an upward rise over the coming years. Depending on fluctuations in the world economy, we are likely to see another major food crisis over coming years without serious reconsideration of the way industrial agriculture is currently organized, along with our over-dependence on hydrocarbon resources.

Changing the Game in Pakistan - letter in today's Evening Standard

2010-08-09T09:26:00.004Z

This is my letter on latest developments in Pakistan/Afghanistan published in today's Evening Standard:

The fuss over David Cameron's comments on Pakistan exporting terror and his subsequent attempts to repair bridges has been hugely overblown. Given the recent historical context the prospect of relations between Britain and Pakistan being damaged was remote, and Friday's agreement between Zardari and Cameron only reaffirmed the close long-standing military-intelligence co-operation between the countries.

What would have been welcome, but we didn't get, was any consideration following Cameron's comments of whether the relationship between Britain and Pakistan has been counterproductive. Because we are intent on a military solution in Afghanistan, we have become dependent on Pakistan; but the correlation between the troop surge in Afghanistan and the 90 per cent increase in insurgent violence - with executions of aid workers and other civilians becoming increasingly common - shows how the military approach has failed. Militant groups sustained by the situation in Pakistan are the fallback to supply communities with medical aid, infrastructure and education, increasing the Taliban's grip on the country.

If we change our approach by redirecting military spending into development spending in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the situation would change radically. To get things moving in Pakistan,

should we not re-consider our policy of unconditional military aid to Islamabad - or even consider sanctions? It would be a radical departure from current policy, but we should at least have the debate about it.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed

author, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization (Pluto 2010)

Peak Coal Has Arrived

2010-08-07T07:36:00.005Z

A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Science has concluded that world coal production will peak next year. The study finds that on a business-as-usual scenario of exploitation (i.e. without efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions), coal production from existing reserves "is predicted to occur close to the year 2011". After this year, the study warns, "production rates of coal" decline to 1990 levels by the year 2037, reaching "50% of the peak value in the year 2047." It's "unlikely" that any future discoveries of coal reserves will ameliorate this decline.

The Science projections are a major blow to advocates of 'clean coal' technology as a viable solution to cutting CO2 emissions, simply because there is not enough to come anywhere near meeting world energy demand. They also confirm the worst fears of energy analysts who have tracked the inexorable decline in hydrocarbon energies this century. The Energy Watch Group previously forecasted that world coal production would most likely peak around 2025. Now that looks like an extremely conservative prediction.

Given that world oil production most likely has already peaked as of 2005, plateauing through to 2008, and now inexorably declining since then, it would seem we're in for a rather rough ride. Meanwhile, Obama stands by watching the US economy slide deeper into recession, while the dynamic Dave'n'Nick duo insist manically that the cuts will save us all even as the economy slows.

Pakistan's Double Game

2010-08-02T16:07:00.004Z

Prospect Magazine has today published my analysis of the US-Pakistan terror nexus on its blog here:

Since the release of 90,000 pages of classified US military intelligence on operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan by WikiLeaks, the Obama administration has struggled to win the media war. As Vice President Joe Biden insisted in an interview with NBC on Thursday, “All those leaks predate our policy. That’s been a problem in the past, it’s a problem we’re dealing with.” He specified: “Not one leak is consistent with our policy announced in December.”

...

My New Book: A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization

2010-07-14T12:41:00.005Z

My new book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: and how to save it, published by Pluto Press in the UK and distributed by Palgrave Macmillan in North America and Australia, is due out this August, and is available for pre-order. You can get it from Amazon UK, Amazon USA, or, for the best price of £14:99, order directly from the publisher here.

Here's the blurb:

It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilisation. This book argues that financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system.

Most accounts of our contemporary global crises such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their own fields explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about particular crises. This book attempts to investigate all of these crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a 'clash of civilisations', as Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilisation itself.This book provides a stark warning of the consequences of failing to take a broad view of the problems facing the world and shows how catastrophe can be avoided.

I'll post more info about the book in due course.

Feature in Emel Magazine

2010-07-14T12:38:00.002Z

My wife and I are featured in this month's issue Emel Magazine. I forgot to post this here, so, here it is:

Healing Hearts

7/7, Terror and Torture: Protecting the Deep State

2010-07-07T14:36:00.004Z

Five years on from the London tube bombings, we remain no closer to a full, complete and impartial understanding of the terrible events of that day. Today, the coalition government has demonstrated that it has largely fallen in line with the steps of its predecessor.

The announcement that the government will hold an official inquiry into allegations that the secret service was complicit in torture of 'terror suspects' is, needless to note, welcome. But its arrival on the anniversary of the most devastating attack on London since WW2 is no accident.

While in opposition David Cameron and Nick Clegg both supported the call for an independent public inquiry into the 7/7 terrorist attacks. Yet now that power is theirs, the duo’s coalition regime is challenging the 7/7 inquest’s attempts to explore the “preventability” of the attacks. Three weeks ago, MI5 declared they were now preparing to apply for a judicial review of that decision.

While the government’s underhandedly attempts to quash the only independent inquiry process currently available in the form of the inquest proceedings, Cameron’s much-lauded declaration of a decision to hold an inquiry into the torture allegations has served to eclipse public recollection of the whole 7/7 inquiry issue. Yet the proposed torture inquiry is not designed to involve a meaningful investigation, but has far more to do with damage-control over the pending lawsuits of 12 torture victims suing the intelligence services for official complicity in their torture. Those lawsuits pose the danger of exposing in public hearings the systemic misconduct of the intelligence services with high-level Whitehall approval, through potentially damaging and embarrassing subpoena requests and witness calls.

The official announcement of a torture inquiry follows Cameron’s confirmation yesterday that the government would offer large compensation sums to the 12 claimants on condition that they drop their lawsuits. Meanwhile, the proposed inquiry has been emasculated before even beginning. As the Guardian’s Richard Norton-Taylor reported:

“Cameron yesterday suggested, and government officials made clear, that most of the evidence to the inquiry will be heard in private, and as a non-statutory inquiry, its powers will be limited. ‘It will not establish legal liability, nor order financial settlement,’ Cameron said in a letter to Gibson, published yesterday.

It will not summon witnesses from foreign countries, such as current or former CIA officers. And it will not be able to compel any individuals to give evidence. Last night, Whitehall officials said that former Labour ministers, including Tony Blair, will not be asked to give evidence, even though the treatment of British citizens and residents under investigation happened on their watch.”

The government has also refused to disclose the official guidelines to intelligence officers for handling detainees which applied during the periods detainees were allegedly abused. Instead, it has offered to publish new “consolidated” guidelines, and while simultaneously showing no inclination to properly investigate or even acknowledge the official policy under which British security services oversaw torture.

Peter Oborne in the Daily Mail further points out that the 3 proposed panel members to head the inquiry seem to have been hand-picked for their subservience to the Whitehall establishment, particularly the security services:

“The signs are worrying. Sir Peter is a thoroughly acceptable figure to British spies because he has been Commissioner of the Intelligence Services since 2006, and was reappointed only last year.

Most of his work is carried out away from the public eye, but I have heard no reports of Sir Peter asking probing questions of MI5 and MI6 bosses over the past few years, despite the publication of a mass of troubling material during that period.

A second member of the tribunal, Peter Riddell, is a retired journalist from the Times newspaper who, five years ago, published a book celebrating Tony Blair’s relationship with George W. Bush and the U.S. — by coincidence at almost exactly the moment the worst of the alleged torture abuses were taking place.

Riddell, though a cheerful and popular figure, has never been known for the kind of forensic investigation and harsh scrutiny this inquiry surely requires.

Many will surmise that this is exactly why he was appointed.

Meanwhile the Times, for which Mr Riddell worked for many years, has given only perfunctory coverage to the numerous revelations about British complicity over the past few years.

Though regarded with amiable fondness by senior Whitehall and intelligence figures, Peter Riddell has not yet demonstrated any of the toughness or readiness to challenge the Whitehall establishment this investigation requires.

The third member of the inquiry panel is Dame Janet Paraskeva, the First Commissioner of the Civil Service. She is also head of several quangos: she is chair of the body that hands out billions of Lottery money to Olympic causes, and also chair of the quango which oversees the Child Support Agency.”

Indeed, Gibson has a track record of simply overlooking inconvenient questions when it comes to investigating the intelligence services. As Norton-Tayler points out, under Gordon Brown’s appointment, he investigated “how GCHQ intercept intelligence was shared in the case of the Omagh bombing in August 1998. His report focused on whether the bombing could have been stopped, after the BBC disclosed that GCHQ were monitoring mobiles used in the bomb run. Gibson concluded it could not have been stopped, though he did not investigate the BBC's core allegation: why information from the intercepts was not shared with the CID officers trying to identity the bombers.”

Hardly inspires confidence. Unless, of course, you’re David Cameron, or Nick Clegg, in which case it may very well inspire a whole bucket-load of confidence.

So we have a whitewash torture inquiry in the making and an ongoing crackdown on the integrity of the 7/7 inquest. What is Whitehall trying to hide?

Part of the answer can be found in a brilliant new book by well-known British dissident historian Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: British Collusion with Radical Islam (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2010). The book has been out a week now – unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to read it yet – but given Curtis’ previous efforts, this is likely to be yet another tour de force exposing Anglo-American skulduggery. Whereas Curtis’ previous work focused on perusing the declassified official files to explore Britain’s role as “junior partner” in US imperial ambitions to crush nationalist and anti-colonialist resistance movements to the expansion of the emerging 'liberal' order, his latest work focuses squarely on the menace of our times – Islamist terrorism. The gist of his argument, which dovetails with my own work on this issue, is summarised in the opening passage of his Guardian piece published two days ago:

“When the London bombers struck five years ago, many people blamed the invasion of Iraq for inspiring them. But the connection between 7/7 and British foreign policy goes much deeper. The terrorist threat to Britain is partly ‘blowback’, resulting from a web of British covert operations with militant Islamist groups stretching back decades. And while terrorism is held up as the country's biggest security challenge, Whitehall's collusion with radical Islam is continuing... dependence on militant Islamists to achieve foreign policy objectives is an echo of the past, when such collusion was aimed at controlling oil resources and overthrowing nationalist governments.”

Curtis reveals how in the 1950s, Britain flirted with Islamist militants in Iran to facilitate the overthrow of democratically elected Mossadeq, when he challenged Anglo-American corporate hegemony over the country’s oil resources, and covertly financed the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood from the 40s through to the 70s to roll-back Egyptian President Nasser’s dangerous brand of pan-Arab nationalism. He also points out more recent episodes – the covert British financing in 1999 of the al-Qaeda-affiliated KLA, complete with one elite KLA unit being commandeered by the brother of bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri; tacit approval of Shi’ite death squads in Iraq; the continuing contradictory alliance with Pakistan despite its being the primary state-sponsor of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. He adds a highly revealing tidbit:

“Militants may be serving other useful functions. The then Foreign Office minister Kim Howells told a parliamentary inquiry in March 2007: ‘At dinners at embassies around the world I have suddenly discovered that somebody happens to be sitting next to me who is from the respectable end of a death squad from somewhere. The ambassador has, with the best will in the world, invited that person along because he thinks that, under the new democracy, they will become the new government.’”

The attitude is, in other words, commonplace – and standard diplomatic practice: Identify potential useful idiots, whether they be militants or terrorists is of no consequence, as long as they might play a role in facilitating British social engineering projects to enforce ‘democracies’ in regions that just happen to be of key strategic significance in terms of geopolitics, resources, and so on.

What we’re seeing today is not the emergence of accountability, as the coalition government had promised, but a return to the age-old imperatives of damage-control, secrecy and the protection of the capacity of the deep state to continue to operate outside the rule of law, in the name of national security.

McChrystal Falls: Another Casualty of a War We're Losing

2010-06-25T20:03:00.002Z

It is no surprise that President Obama decided to sack General Stanley McChrystal after he and his aides were quoted criticising the president and other senior administration officials in Rolling Stone – of all places. But the debacle has revealed the extent of the deepening divisions between senior US Army officials in charge of the offensive in Afghanistan, and the wider US government. Most of all, their disparaging remarks about Obama, envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, vice-president Joe Biden and national security adviser Jim Jones illustrate a perception among senior military officers that the civilian government is increasingly out of touch with what is happening on the ground.

Indeed, shielded beneath the surface of this bureaucratic squabbling over name-calling is the increasingly uncomfortable fact that we are simply not winning this war – and that Obama’s troop surge, originally proposed by McChrystal, has only made the situation worse. Although Obama has been quick to emphasise with his appointment of General David Petraeus that the counterinsurgency strategy developed by McChrystal for Afghanistan will continue unchanged, the truth is that the current re-shuffling serves to distract from the dire facts on the ground, but is unlikely to change them without a fundamental re-think of our Afghan policy.

Despite now nearly 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan, there are no signs of an allied victory. A Pentagon report submitted to US Congress earlier in April confirmed that overall violence in Afghanistan has increased by 90 per cent over the preceding year, prompted by increasing allied offensives in Taliban-controlled areas as well as Taliban successes in re-capturing regions previously cleared by US forces. The bulk of this dramatic increase was from a 240 per cent spike in roadside bomb attacks. Then just a few days ago, the UN Security Council published its own damning assessment that in the first four months of 2010 alone, there has been a doubling of violence, including suicide attacks, roadside bombings and political assassinations – with targeted killings of Afghan officials increasing by 45 per cent, largely in the south where the insurgency is concentrated.

Although both the Pentagon and UN reports go out of their way to suggest that the long-term outlook for stability is positive, internal US Army assessments are far more pessimistic. In the summer 2009 edition of Military Review, a refereed journal published by the US Army Combined Arms Center, Afghanistan veteran and senior NATO official Lt. Col. Thomas Brouns observes of the war that “victory remains elusive.” Despite “tactical and local successes”, he warns, “the possibility of strategic defeat looms ever larger... Since the earliest days of Operation Enduring Freedom, violent incidents have increased roughly in parallel to the overall troop strength.” Indeed, Brouns – who has deployed on four tours to Kabul – points out that “facts on the ground are not working in our favour... the incidence of events and accompanying casualties (to include civilians) have climbed even faster than troop strength”, including insurgents’ resort to suicide bombings and political killings. The idea that the problem can be solved by “increases in troop strength” is therefore “a dubious one.” This is compounded by the “failure of many investments and projects to reach remote rural areas where poverty predominates”, providing “fertile ground for insurgent recruitment.” Afghans, he argues, “need to see delivery on promises of improved security and tangible improvements in their personal situation – and soon, if we hope to provide lasting stability.”

Yet under the terms of Obama’s current Afghan strategy, now to be pursued by Petraeus, this is impossible. One of the major problems is our supposed regional ally – Pakistan – as two reports out this month corroborate. The first, by Harvard University fellow Dr. Matt Walden, published by the London School of Economics Crisis States Research Centre, found based on interviews with Taliban field commanders and Western defence officials that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) continues to be “the provider of sanctuary and substantial financial, military and logistical support to the insurgency” as a part of its ‘official policy’ of exerting “strong strategic and operational influence on the Afghan Taliban.” Following hot on its heels came a RAND Corp. report which documented ongoing official Pakistani ISI support for militant Islamist terrorist networks such as the al-Qaeda affiliated Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. “Militant groups persist in the nation because Pakistani leaders continue to provide support to some groups”, the study noted, urging that “a key objective of US policy must be to get Pakistan to end its support to militant groups.”

The irony is that this is hardly news to the US government. Confidential NATO reports and US intelligence assessments circulated to White House officials have documented consistent cases of ISI sponsorship of Taliban insurgents since 2004. Indeed, in 2008 US intelligence intercepted a communication in which ISI chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiani described senior Taliban leader, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, as a “strategic asset” – although Haqqani’s insurgent network has been a key target for US Predator drone strikes. Despite this, last year Obama persuaded Congress to sign-up for an unconditional $6 billion in military and economic assistance to Pakistan for five years.

The Afghan-Pakistan strategy is not working, and Gen. Petraeus will do no better than his loud-mouthed predecessor. The imperative now should be to withdraw and cease all military aid to Pakistan, making all aid conditional on cessation of support for militant and terrorist groups; to swiftly draw-down and pull-out military forces from Afghanistan; and to re-direct the remaining military budgets into massively increasing humanitarian and developmental aid to Afghans, including re-doubling reconstruction investments.

New York Review of Books: The Radicalization of Race Politics in Israel

2010-06-02T10:08:00.004Z

The latest issue of NYRB has an eye-opening and lengthy piece by Peter Beinart on what he calls "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment", which essentially explores the deepening divide between extremists and liberals on the spectrum of Zionist and/or Jewish thought and culture, both in Israel and in the United States.

Here are some choice excerpts focusing primarily on the disturbing trend of radicalization of race politics in Israel, where ideas like the violent ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians in order to permanently 'separate' them off from a state defined exclusively along ethnic lines as 'Jewish', have over decades become increasingly entrenched into the mainstream political discourse, increasingly so with the rise of Netanyahu:

[...]

Since the 1990s, journalists and scholars have been describing a bifurcation in Israeli society. In the words of Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi, “After decades of what came to be called a national consensus, the Zionist narrative of liberation [has] dissolved into openly contesting versions.” One version, “founded on a long memory of persecution, genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival, is pessimistic, distrustful of non-Jews, and believing only in Jewish power and solidarity.” Another, “nourished by secularized versions of messianism as well as the Enlightenment idea of progress,” articulates “a deep sense of the limits of military force, and a commitment to liberal-democratic values.” Every country manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth.

As Ezrahi and others have noted, this latter, liberal-democratic Zionism has grown alongside a new individualism, particularly among secular Israelis, a greater demand for free expression, and a greater skepticism of coercive authority. You can see this spirit in “new historians” like Tom Segev who have fearlessly excavated the darker corners of the Zionist past and in jurists like former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak who have overturned Knesset laws that violate the human rights guarantees in Israel’s “Basic Laws.” You can also see it in former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s apparent willingness to relinquish much of the West Bank in 2000 and early 2001.

But in Israel today, this humane, universalistic Zionism does not wield power. To the contrary, it is gasping for air. To understand how deeply antithetical its values are to those of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, it’s worth considering the case of Effi Eitam. Eitam, a charismatic ex–cabinet minister and war hero, has proposed ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank. “We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from [the] political system,” he declared in 2006. In 2008, Eitam merged his small Ahi Party into Netanyahu’s Likud. And for the 2009–2010 academic year, he is Netanyahu’s special emissary for overseas “campus engagement.” In that capacity, he visited a dozen American high schools and colleges last fall on the Israeli government’s behalf. The group that organized his tour was called “Caravan for Democracy.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman once shared Eitam’s views. In his youth, he briefly joined Meir Kahane’s now banned Kach Party, which also advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israeli soil. Now Lieberman’s position might be called “pre-expulsion.” He wants to revoke the citizenship of Israeli Arabs who won’t swear a loyalty oath to the Jewish state. He tried to prevent two Arab parties that opposed Israel’s 2008–2009 Gaza war from running candidates for the Knesset. He said Arab Knesset members who met with representatives of Hamas should be executed. He wants to jail Arabs who publicly mourn on Israeli Independence Day, and he hopes to permanently deny citizenship to Arabs from other countries who marry Arab citizens of Israel.

You don’t have to be paranoid to see the connection between Lieberman’s current views and his former ones. The more you strip Israeli Arabs of legal protection, and the more you accuse them of treason, the more thinkable a policy of expulsion becomes. Lieberman’s American defenders often note that in theory he supports a Palestinian state. What they usually fail to mention is that for him, a two-state solution means redrawing Israel’s border so that a large chunk of Israeli Arabs find themselves exiled to another country, without their consent.

Lieberman served as chief of staff during Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister. And when it comes to the West Bank, Netanyahu’s own record is in its way even more extreme than his protégé’s. In his 1993 book, A Place among the Nations, Netanyahu not only rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian. In fact, he repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood with Nazism. An Israel that withdraws from the West Bank, he has declared, would be a “ghetto-state” with “Auschwitz borders.” And the effort “to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of Israel” resembles Hitler’s bid to wrench the German-speaking “Sudeten district” from Czechoslovakia in 1938. It is unfair, Netanyahu insists, to ask Israel to concede more territory since it has already made vast, gut-wrenching concessions. What kind of concessions? It has abandoned its claim to Jordan, which by rights should be part of the Jewish state.

On the left of Netanyahu’s coalition sits Ehud Barak’s emasculated Labor Party, but whatever moderating potential it may have is counterbalanced by what is, in some ways, the most illiberal coalition partner of all, Shas, the ultra-Orthodox party representing Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent. At one point, Shas—like some of its Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox counterparts—was open to dismantling settlements. In recent years, however, ultra-Orthodox Israelis, anxious to find housing for their large families, have increasingly moved to the West Bank, where thanks to government subsidies it is far cheaper to live. Not coincidentally, their political parties have swung hard against territorial compromise. And they have done so with a virulence that reflects ultra-Orthodox Judaism’s profound hostility to liberal values. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’s immensely powerful spiritual leader, has called Arabs “vipers,” “snakes,” and “ants.” In 2005, after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed dismantling settlements in the Gaza Strip, Yosef urged that “God strike him down.” The official Shas newspaper recently called President Obama “an Islamic extremist.”

Hebrew University Professor Ze’ev Sternhell is an expert on fascism and a winner of the prestigious Israel Prize. Commenting on Lieberman and the leaders of Shas in a recent Op-Ed in Haaretz, he wrote, “The last time politicians holding views similar to theirs were in power in post–World War II Western Europe was in Franco’s Spain.” With their blessing, “a crude and multifaceted campaign is being waged against the foundations of the democratic and liberal order.” Sternhell should know. In September 2008, he was injured when a settler set off a pipe bomb at his house.

Israeli governments come and go, but the Netanyahu coalition is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society: an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism. In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young. When Israeli high schools held mock elections last year, Lieberman won. This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students—and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish high school students—would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset. An education ministry official called the survey “a huge warning signal in light of the strengthening trends of extremist views among the youth.”

[...]

Professor Jake Lynch: Why the Flotilla Massacre Shows We Need to Take Action Now

2010-06-02T09:49:00.003Z

An excellent brief analysis from Jack Lynch, Director of Sydney University's Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies - the IDF's attempts to storm and control the boats were illegal, constituting an act of piracy as defined by the International Maritime Bureau, as well as being in violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention by way of supporting illegal measures of collective punishment as exemplified in the blockage of Gaza, which the attacked boats were attempting to break. Lynch repeats the call for a comprehensive international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign - the same kind of campaign that was necessary to bring down the racist repression of South African apartheid:

A massive and cynical misdirection is underway. Israel is not the victim here. Those killed were humanitarians intent on delivering aid to Gaza, not gun-toting commandoes who descended from the night sky.

This was an act of piracy, in international waters, on the definition of the International Maritime Bureau: “the act of boarding any vessel with an intent to commit theft or any other crime, and with an intent or capacity to use force in furtherance of that act”.

The goods on board belonged to the relief campaign, and were intended for Palestinians: Israel was trying to take possession of them illegally.

And it was committed in furtherance of a blockade, which amounts to collective punishment on the definition in Article 33 of the fourth Geneva Convention: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited”.

Antony Loewenstein writes about the diplomatic fallout from Israel’s latest criminal act, here.

How did Israel come to believe it could get away with this? The same reason it is getting away with it now, in the conclaves of global governance: continuing protection from its patron in Washington and complicit silence, alternating with a mountain of weasel words and evasions, from politicians and media in countries allied with the US. Read my article about an act of censorship by Australia’s ABC – typical of the syndrome – here.

It’s time to take matters into our own hands. Israel is a small country with an open economy, heavily dependent on access to international markets and networked capital. These are things we can withhold. We need to send the message: have your jobs, your prosperity, your access to the outside world, OR have your illegal military occupation and your behaviour as a rogue state. But you can’t have both.

BOYCOTT; DIVESTMENT; SANCTIONS.

Jake

Associate Professor Jake Lynch, BA, Dip Journalism Studies, PhD

Director, Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies

Chair of Organizing Committee, IPRA conference 2010

Executive Member, Sydney Peace Foundation

Room 121 | Mackie Building (K01)

The University of Sydney | NSW | 2006

AUSTRALIA

The Flotilla Massacre - Israeli Commandos Fired Unprovoked Into Sleeping Civilians: Eyewitnesses

2010-05-31T22:39:00.010Z

What really happened? Well, the Israeli story, at face value, is difficult to take seriously. The activists on board the Flotilla were not peace activists, they are "terrorists" and "terrorist sympathisers" who supposedly in PM Netanyahu's words "mobbed, beat, stabbed and maybe even shot at" Israeli soldiers who were, of course, just popping in for a nice cup of tea... or bowl of homous... or whatever.

Yes, of course, lunatic hate-infested anti-Semitic terrorists like bestselling novelist Henning Mankell, Nobel peace laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire, three German MPs including professor of public law Norman Paech, and 80-year old US film producer David Schermerhorn. No doubt, just waiting for the opportune moment to unleash their raging pent-up fanaticism by ruthlessly opening fire on a bunch of utterly hapless, unwitting, ... erm... highly-trained, er .... armed with tear gas and rifles, ....... er... Israeli commandos.

In the process of this valiant self-defence by our hapless rag-tag bunch of Israeli war-heroes who were only looking to have a tea-break on a nice cruise, it seems that, well, not a single Israeli soldier was actually killed. But up to 19 of the terrorists on board the Flotilla were successfully liquidated, and another 80 were taught a damn good lesson: don't try to break the illegal blockage and siege of Gaza - described by John Ging, head of UNRWA Operations in Gaza, as "a medieval measure which threatens to destroy the mentality, mindsets and outlook of hundreds of thousands of innocents in a process designed to unravel the fabric of civilised society"; described by UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights Richard Falk as almost genocidal form of total war.

This is a familiar story - namely, the usual lack of parity between the overwhelming and indiscriminate application of force by the Israeli military against unarmed and untrained civilians, a story that has characterized the Middle East conflict since 1948 when, as most Israeli historians agree, Zionist settler-colonists pursued a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing to expunge the land of non-Jewish peoples.

Here are two first-hand accounts I received in my inbox yesterday from senior activists on board the boat, Huwaida Arraf and Ewa Jasciewica, describing their experiences:

At 11:00 pm Cyprus time and in international waters off the coast of Israel, the boats were contacted by the Israeli navy. "Who are you and where are you going?" Our reply was that we were part of a flotilla and we were going to Gaza to deliver humanitarian supplies.

On the radar, the boats could see three Israeli war ships shadowing us, and 15 minutes later, a silent aircraft hovered over the flotilla. One of our Hebrew speakers had found Israel's strategy and posted it to us. It stated, "You will be boarded by highly trained, very efficient and very SILENT commandos. They will use silent inflatable boats to get to our boats and both try to board our boats directly from the inflatables and by dropping divers into the water to climb onto the boats," so people were preparing for them to come up and over the sides of the ships.

Our SPOT locator has sent out several HELP messages at www.witnessgaza.com.

Lubna Marsawa, Free Gaza's organizer on the Turkish passenger boat said in outrage, "Very few times in history has a flotilla delivering humanitarian goods been welcomed by military war ships."

This is a call to the world from the people on the boats. "We are a civilian people doing what our governments have refused to do, challenge Israel's right to collectively punish 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza by blockading their right to their own sea. This flotilla is bringing construction and educational supplies the people of Gaza and are being met by Israeli warships.

Then, the following shocking account at 6:30 yesterday morning, from Greta Berlin - an account which not only explains why whatever the crew of peace activists did, they were doing it in self-defence, amidst an unfolding massacre:

Under darkness of night, Israeli commandoes dropped from a helicopter onto the Turkish passenger ship, Mavi Marmara, and began to shoot the moment their feet hit the deck. They fired directly into the crowd of civilians asleep... Streaming video shows the Israeli soldiers shooting at civilians, and our last SPOT beacon said, "HELP, we are being contacted by the Israelis."

We know nothing about the other five boats. Israel says they are taking over the boats.

The coalition of Free Gaza Movement (FG), European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza (ECESG), Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), the Perdana Global Peace Organisation , Ship to Gaza Greece, Ship to Gaza Sweden, and the International Committee to Lift the Siege on Gaza appeal to the international community to demand that Israel stop their brutal attack on civilians delivering vitally needed aid to the imprisoned Palestinians of Gaza and permit the ships to continue on their way.

The attack has happened in international waters, 75 miles off the coast of Israel, in direct violation of international law.

Many of those activists being shot at while they slept, didn't wake up. Many of those that did wake up, woke up bleeding and wounded. Many tried to defend themselves in whatever way they could, obviously terrorising their commando-attacks even more, unleashing further bloodshed.

Under Netanyahu, the IDF has become increasingly unhinged. Utterly incapable of grasping that its war crimes and crimes against humanity can no longer simply be dressed up as a fight against terrorists, when terror itself is a primary instrument of statecraft. Completely incapable of self-reflection or self-critique. Pathetically incapable of putting to rest the 'final solution' of the knee-jerk trigger-finger.

It is a sign of things to come.