Johanna Chao Kreilick named President of Union of Concerned Scientists

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) announced today that Johanna Chao Kreilick, an executive officer at the Open Society Foundations, will be its next president. Founded in 1969 at MIT, UCS has grown to be a $46 million science-based advocacy organization that combines technical analysis and advocacy to create innovative, practical solutions for a healthy, safe and sustainable future.

Kreilick was selected after an exhaustive nationwide recruitment effort conducted by Boardwalk Consulting that reached out to more than 500 candidates. She will join the organization officially on May 10, 2021.

“For three decades, Johanna Chao Kreilick has been a passionate driver of social change,” said Dr. Anne Kapuscinski, UCS board chair and the director of the Coastal Science and Policy Program and a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We were particularly impressed with her track record of integrating racial justice into the work and culture of complex organizations, her understanding of the role of science in effective decision making, and her ability to work with teams of researchers and advocates to advance policies that make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.”

Most recently, Kreilick managed the Open Society Foundations’ strategy unit responsible for planning, research and assessment for the Foundations’ 50 global programs, national foundations and advocacy offices. While at Open Society, she founded the $43 million Climate Action Initiative. The U.S. component includes support for nonpartisan public mobilization and policy advocacy at city, state, regional and federal levels, as well as shareholder advocacy and litigation aimed at corporate polluters.

Click here to read UCS’s announcement.

Barry Commoner interview regarding pollution and use of science, 1968-02-07

Interview with Washington University biologist Barry Commoner regarding the the impact of science and scientific developments on environmental and social sustainability. Diamond was a speaker at the "Emerging Universities and National Concerns" conference held at Ball State University on February 7-8, 1968, delivering a speech entitled "Science, Technology, and Human Values."

Michael Moore - Planet of the Humans (Full Documentary)

Planet of the Humans é um documentário ambiental que foi dirigido por Jeff Gibbs e foi lançado em 2019. Foi apoiado e promovido por Michael Moore. Mais info no Wikipedia (inglês)
Michael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will this Earth Day — that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road — selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. 
This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement’s answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It's too little, too late. Removed from the debate is the only thing that MIGHT save us: getting a grip on our out-of-control human presence and consumption. 
Why is this not THE issue? Because that would be bad for profits, bad for business. Have we environmentalists fallen for illusions, “green” illusions, that are anything but green, because we’re scared that this is the end—and we’ve pinned all our hopes on biomass, wind turbines, and electric cars? No amount of batteries are going to save us, warns director Jeff Gibbs (lifelong environmentalist and co-producer of “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Bowling for Columbine"). 
This urgent, must-see movie, a full-frontal assault on our sacred cows, is guaranteed to generate anger, debate, and, hopefully, a willingness to see our survival in a new way—before it’s too late. 
Featuring: Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Richard Branson, Robert F Kennedy Jr., Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Vinod Khosla, Koch Brothers, Vandana Shiva, General Motors, 350.org, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Nature Conservancy,Richard Heinberg, Elon Musk, Tesla. 
Music by: Radiohead, King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Blank & Jones, If These Trees Could Talk, Valentina Lisitsa, Culprit 1, Patrick O’hearn, The Torquays, Nigel Stanford, and many more. 

Resenha e Críticas aqui

Website: Planet of the Humans

Estudo internacional alerta que as redes tróficas naturais estão em perigo

Não é só o clima que está a mudar, mas a parte viva do nosso planeta também está a ser rapidamente modificada pela ação humana, dando corpo a um conjunto de Alterações Biológicas Globais. O alerta é de três investigadores da Universidade de Coimbra (UC), da Oregon State University (USA) e do Instituto Mediterráneo de Estudios Avanzados (CSIC-UIB, Espanha), num artigo científico publicado hoje na Web Ecology.

Neste trabalho, os investigadores recolheram evidências «incontornáveis» de que essas alterações biológicas «não afetam apenas algumas espécies isoladas, mas que simplificam redes alimentares inteiras, ameaçando a persistência das comunidades biológicas naturais a longo prazo. Devemos tomar medidas urgentes para proteger a integridade das cadeias tróficas naturais, sob o risco de empurrarmos rapidamente ecossistemas inteiros para fora dos seus limites de segurança», afirma Ruben Heleno, coautor do artigo e investigador do Centre for Functional Ecology – Science for People & the Planet da Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra (FCTUC).

De referir que há quase três décadas,1.700 cientistas emitiram um primeiro aviso à humanidade, alertando para a necessidade de proteger a “rede de interdependências entre seres vivos (…) cujas interações e dinâmicas apenas em parte compreendemos”. Desde então, cientistas de todo o mundo abraçaram completamente esta missão de descobrir as regras que regem a formação, funcionamento e resiliência das complexas redes de interações biológicas que em última análise suportam a vida na Terra.

Recentemente, um segundo aviso foi emitido e assinado por mais de 15.000 cientistas de 187 países declarando que “para prevenir a miséria generalizada e uma catastrófica perda de biodiversidade, a humanidade não pode seguir na atual trajetória de business as usual e deve enveredar por uma alternativa mais sustentável”.

No estudo agora publicado, explica Ruben Heleno, «adotamos uma visão mais alargada de biodiversidade e reavaliamos o estado das redes alimentares no mundo, a sua capacidade de resistir face a ameaças externas, e sobre a capacidade de detetarmos sinais de alerta que nos avisem sobre o eventual colapso das redes tróficas naturais».

As evidências, prossegue, «mostram que a maioria dos motores das alterações globais, como por exemplo o aumento da temperatura, as invasões biológicas, perda de biodiversidade, fragmentação de habitat, e sobre-exploração, tendem a simplificar as redes tróficas, concentrando os fluxos de matéria e energia na natureza através de menos vias, ameaçando a persistência das comunidades biológicas no longo prazo. Ainda mais preocupantes, são as observações que mostram que comunidades inteiras podem passar rapidamente de elevados níveis de diversidade para comunidades totalmente empobrecidas, onde apenas algumas espécies se mantêm, com poucos ou nenhuns sinais de alerta».

O investigador da UC salienta ainda que, «de um modo geral, a melhor evidência mostra claramente que para além de termos de enfrentar o desafio das alterações climáticas e de contrariar a tendência de extinção de espécies ameaçadas, precisamos igualmente de enfrentar o desafio de travar as alterações biológicas globais e especificamente de proteger as redes alimentares na natureza, ou arriscamo-nos a assistir ao colapso de ecossistemas inteiros». Em simultâneo, nota Ruben Heleno, «precisamos de perceber melhor os potenciais efeitos sinergísticos ou atenuadores entre os motores das alterações climáticas e biológicas. Aqui, destacamos os principais desafios à conservação das redes alimentares na natureza e os avanços recentes que nos podem ajudar enfrentar esses desafios».

O ecossocialismo singular de Barry Commoner

O mundo sobreviverá à crise ambiental

como um todo, ou não sobreviverá.

Barry Commoner

A crise ecológica que vivemos é o maior desafio posto à nossa espécie. Limites planetáriosi estão sendo ultrapassados, estabelecendo sinergias de efeitos imprevisíveis. O grau de deterioração das condições da vida como a conhecemos exige-nos uma mudança de rumo sem paralelo na história da humanidade. Seremos capazes de construir soluções para estes desafios? Talvez o ponto de não retorno já tenha sido ultrapassado e o futuro possível não seja o desejado por ninguém, mas a paralisia não é uma opção. Seja como for, muitas experiências e práticas sociais, comportamentos e cosmovisões, lutas políticas e análises teóricas constituem, hoje, um patrimônio de alternativas.

O marxismo não se furtou ao debate, com múltiplos pensadores e grupos incorporando a temática ambiental à crítica da economia política, buscando estabelecer uma compreensão da natureza em bases filosóficas e teóricas materialistas e formulando um projeto ecossocialista. O biólogo nova-iorquino Barry Commoner foi um de seus pioneiros e um incansável combatente ambiental. Este texto é uma singela homenagem a sua contribuição em The Closing Circle – Nature, Man and Tecnology, obra que não foi publicada em português e que completa 50 anos em 2021.

Testes nucleares e poluição

Barry Commoner (1917-2012) nasceu em Nova York, formou-se em zoologia na Universidade de Columbia e fez mestrado e doutorado em Harvard, onde se engajou no movimento por uma ciência pública. Depois do serviço militar durante a Segunda Guerra, trabalhou na Science Illustrated e tornou-se, em 1947, professor na Universidade Washington, em Saint Louis, no Missouri. Commoner destacou-se por debater o significado do conhecimento científico numa sociedade democrática, envolvendo-se em diversas pesquisas e campanhas contra os efeitos que o capitalismo industrial impunha sobre a sociedade estadunidense. Dois caminhos se entrelaçavam em seus trabalho: os impactos desconhecidos dos testes nucleares e o aumento vertiginoso da poluição e da contaminação do ar, da terra e dos ecossistemas.

O contexto da Guerra Fria exigia cuidado na formulação das críticas ao establishment, associadas, em geral, ao anti-americanismo e ao comunismo. Seu papel no (CNI) Comitê pela Informação Nuclear, organização formada por cientistas para o compartilhamento dos dados e pesquisas sobre os efeitos da radiação, foi fundamental para o banimento dos testes nucleares atmosféricos em 1963. O Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, considerado a primeira vitória do movimento ambientalista, foi associado à mobilização da opinião pública estadunidense após a divulgação dos resultados sobre contaminação radioativa a partir da análise de centenas de milhares de dentes de leite doados para a campanha Baby Tooth Survey.

As mobilizações e debates ambientalistas nos EUA intensificaram-se no início dos anos 1970, revelando intensas divergências metodológicas e políticas sobre como enfrentar os desafios. Nesse contexto, a publicação de The Closing Circle consolidou uma perspectiva holística no entendimento da questão ambiental de forma inovadora e crítica do modelo industrial de produção e consumo, inserindo o tema social no debate científico, técnico e ambientalista.

A divergência populacional

O tema do controle populacional apresentava-se como central para os movimentos ambientais norte-americanos, que deitavam raízes profundas no liberalismo do país. Paul e Anne Ehrlich publicaram, em 1968, The Population Bomb, um livro que se tornou referência no debate. Ao posicionar-se contrário aos argumentos neomalthusianos sobre a necessidade do controle populacional, Commoner estabeleceu, com The Closing Circle, os caminhos da sua crítica. Ainda que não negligenciasse os impactos ambientais provenientes de uma população em crescimento, indicava que o padrão de consumo pós-1945 era o principal responsável pela destruição ambiental. O livro dialoga com o movimento, no que era o estado da arte das análises do começo dos anos 1970, e expõe a gravidade da situação. Faz duro diagnóstico, aponta saídas e, como diz Michael Eganii, acerta.

Dois eixos estruturam o trabalho de Commoner: a defesa intransigente da ecologia como a única alternativa para garantia da sobrevivência da espécie humana e das outras formas de vida nesse processo de interdependência e a ideia de que a superação desse modelo só terá êxito se atingir as raízes sociais do problema.

Meio século depois, a lógica do capital ampliou e potencializou os danos causados em escala global. A única certeza que temos é que se oferecêssemos qualquer dado sobre a destruição ambiental e a crise ecológica como resultados do modo de produção capitalista, eles estariam defasados e para pior quando fossem lidos.

A dialética da ecologia

Commoner estabeleceu, em The Closing Circle, quatro leis para a ecologia:

1º Tudo está conectado a tudo;

2º Tudo tem que ir para algum lugar;

3º A natureza conhece melhor caminho; e

4º Não existe almoço grátis.

Elas consolidam uma nova epistemologia. Questionam, ao mesmo tempo, a lógica liberal – que socializa as “externalidades” e torna a tecnologia redentora destes efeitos indesejados – e o cálculo econômico – que despreza os custos da poluição e da destruição ambiental.

O livro alinha uma intensa crítica ao papel da tecnologia que, submetida ao capital e ao complexo militar, desenvolveu mercadorias e processos que aceleraram a destruição do planeta. O aumento populacional e o incremento da renda são a menor parte do problema. Para ele, a tecnologia utilizada pós-1946 desenvolveu um número maior de poluentes por unidade, responsável por cerca de 95% da produção totaliii. O aumento da poluição deveria, portanto, ser buscado no que se produz, como se produz e por que se produz.

O aumento dos deslocamentos para os subúrbios nas grandes cidades dos Estados Unidos depois de 1945 consolidou um mercado de consumo de veículos e combustíveis adequado às necessidades desse setor, que progressivamente se especializou em seduzir seus consumidores pelo design, pelo aumento da potência e conforto. Tal processo persiste hoje, mesmo com a indústria automobilística transitando marcadamente para a motorização híbrida ou elétrica.

No entanto, essa transição recoloca o paradoxo Jevonsiv, uma vez que observamos não a diminuição, mas o aumento do consumo de energia, ao mesmo tempo em que ocorrem melhorias na eficiência dos motores e na diversificação das matrizes energéticas. As motorizações híbridas ou elétricas criam, ao custo de impactos socioambientais significativos, novos mercados consumidores, novos produtos e novas formas de diferenciação social, sem pôr em questão a lógica da produção.

Ao demonstrar que as origens da catástrofe ambiental estão conectadas aos ditames do regime de acumulação e exploração, Commoner reafirma o caráter político das decisões ambientais. Diz ele:

A análise deixa claro, creio, que a crise não é o resultado de uma catástrofe natural ou da força mal direcionada das atividades biológicas humanas. A Terra não está poluída porque o homem é uma espécie de animal especialmente sujo, nem porque somos muitos.

A culpa é da sociedade humana – das maneiras pelas quais a sociedade escolheu ganhar, distribuir e usar a riqueza que foi extraída dos recursos do planeta pelo trabalho humano. Uma vez que as origens sociais da crise se tornem claras, podemos começar a planejar ações sociais apropriadas para resolvê-lav.

Ao pensar a questão ambiental nessa interação ampla das ações sistêmicas sobre a natureza, Commoner incorporou novos componentes epistemológicos no debate sobre ecologia. Sua crítica metodológica à compartimentação e segmentação das ciências me deixou mais à vontade como historiador para lidar com ecologia.

O reducionismo tende a isolar as disciplinas científicas umas das outras e todas elas do mundo real. Em cada caso, a disciplina parece estar se afastando da observação do objeto natural e real: os biólogos tendem a estudar não o organismo vivo natural, mas as células e, em última análise, as moléculas isoladas deles. Um resultado dessa abordagem é que a comunicação entre as disciplinas se torna difícil, (…) A falha de comunicação entre essas ciências básicas especializadas é uma fonte importante de dificuldade na compreensão dos problemas ambientaisvi.

A questão social, espinha dorsal do ecossocialismo

Essas conexões precisavam acontecer também em termos sociais. Ainda que seu trabalho em popularizar as informações sobre riscos à saúde e ao ambiente oriundos da produção industrial, da agricultura capitalista, do uso de novos elementos químicos e da indústria petrolífera fosse central no debate sobre democracia, esse ainda era um tema essencialmente branco. Dizia, “a crise ambiental é uma crise de sobrevivência, e esse não é um tema da classe média americana”. Enquanto que para os negros, o tema da sobrevivência tem centenas de anos. Se eles também não o dominaram, pelo menos tiveram uma boa experiência que pode ser extremamente valiosa para uma sociedade que, agora como um todo, deve enfrentar a ameaça de extinção. Os negros precisam do movimento ambiental, e o movimento precisa dos negrosvii.

Embora o termo racismo ambientalviii inexistisse, Commoner inseriu uma perspectiva abrangente da ecologia, introduzindo elementos raciais e sociais que expressavam não apenas os impactos sobre os locais de moradia e trabalho das populações mais pobres, mas também os históricos dos enfrentamentos organizados nessas comunidades. As lutas ambientais necessariamente expressavam conflitos mais abrangentes e adquiriam caráter classista, ainda que o termo estivesse ausente no livro. Há uma antecipação do que Joan Martinez Allier vai, duas décadas depois, chamar de O ecologismo dos pobresix.

Dessa perspectiva, o debate ecológico prosseguiu contra os liberais, sustentando que as transformações necessárias não podem ser resultado de escolhas individuais – consumir menos, escolher produtos menos agressivos, andar de bicicletas, reciclar etc. –, mas sim pensadas em termos estruturais.

Aqui residem duas contradições fundamentais do sistema do capital: o processo de busca de crescimento contínuo num sistema ecologicamente fechado e limitado e a contradição entre capital e trabalho manifesta também no custeio ecológico dos efeitos da produção.

Há breve menção sobre o socialismo onde tais contradições não deveriam existir, uma vez que o imperativo do crescimento econômico e da valorização contínua não seriam uma necessidade. Entretanto, o apego ao produtivismo lançou tais sociedades no quadro dessa mesma crise ecológica, pouco se diferenciando dos países capitalistas. É nessa parte que Barry Commoner faz uma breve menção à obra de Marx onde destaca que o tema da destruição ambiental já fazia presente.

The Closing Circle tem alguns silêncios que podem indicar seus limites, mas também o itinerário teórico percorrido pelos movimentos socioambientais ao longo desses 50 anos. Por exemplo, no debate sobre o controle de natalidade nos países pobres, Commoner se colocou na defesa de políticas de distribuição de renda, mesmoconsiderando que o consumo dos ricos tinha um impacto ecológico maior. No entanto, não há referências à autonomia das mulheres e da opção de engravidarem, assim como da importância da melhoria das suas condições de vida, do acesso à educação e saúde, o combate ao patriarcalismo e defesa dos direitos, o que reforça o quanto os movimentos feministas e ecofeministas ganharam espaço e centralidade nas lutas socioambientais.

Outra lacuna do livro é em relação às lutas dos povos originários e comunidades tradicionais em defesa da natureza. Os entendimentos das relações entre os humanos e os outros seres vivos e não vivos compõem um quadro complexo e dinâmico que abrange cosmologias que potencializam novas formas de resistência. Além disso, The Closing Circle aborda superficialmente temas como o imperialismo, a dependência e a colonialidade. Tais questões estão hoje no epicentro da crise ecológica e delineiam as formulações e a ação dos ecossocialistas.

O livro carece, por fim, de uma avaliação mais profunda sobre a neutralidade da Ciência, principalmente pelo fato de que nessas cinco décadas ocorreu uma captura do tema das alternativas à catástrofe ambiental pelo Capital e suas instituições, que reforçam a utilização de recursos como a geoengenharia, tratada como tábua de salvação para a manutenção da lógica do consumo.

O Fechamento do Círculo

Passados 50 anos, a abertura do círculo está maior. A expansão do capitalismo intensificou os processos de destruição. O aumento da produção industrial, a expansão do agronegócio, o consumo dos combustíveis fósseis, a emissão de gases de efeito estufa, a perda de biodiversidade e da cobertura vegetal, a contaminação dos solos e das águas, a acidificação dos oceanos – tudo isso expôs o sentido da lógica sistêmica. O conhecimento sobre esses impactos, suas inter-relações e o modo como se retroalimentam produzem uma espiral de desesperança.

Seguindo a lógica do pessimismo da inteligência e o otimismo da vontade, Barry Commoner, após o duro diagnóstico, conclama à ação. Apresenta a ideia de que o círculo biológico quebrado pelo Capital deveria ser fechado e esse processo só pode ser realizado a partir de um novo modelo de organização social, política, econômica, ética e científica. Embora Commoner não use o conceito marxista de ruptura metabólica, não seria exagero aproximá-lo da noção do círculo rompido. Do mesmo modo, em ambos se põem o desafio de sua superação e a necessidade de restauração dos mecanismos de troca e equilíbrio.

O que salvou a vida da extinção foi a invenção, no curso da evolução, de uma nova forma de vida que reconvertia os resíduos dos organismos primitivos em matéria orgânica, fresca. Os primeiros organismos fotossintéticos transformaram o curso voraz e linear da vida no primeiro grande ciclo ecológico da Terra. Ao fechar o círculo, eles alcançaram o que um organismo não vivo, sozinho, pode realizar – a sobrevivência.

Os seres humanos saíram do círculo da vida, guiados não por suas necessidades biológicas, mas por sua organização social com a divisa de “conquistar” a natureza: enriquecer governados por princípios distintos daqueles que governam a natureza. O resultado final é a crise ambiental, uma crise de sobrevivência. Mais uma vez, para sobreviver, devemos fechar o círculo. Devemos aprender como devolver à natureza a riqueza que dela tomamos emprestada. Em nossa sociedade voltada para o progresso, espera-se que qualquer pessoa que pretenda explicar um problema sério se ofereça para resolvê-lo.

Mas nenhum de nós – sozinho ou em um comitê – pode traçar um “plano” específico para resolver a crise ambiental. Fingir o contrário é apenas fugir do real significado da crise ambiental: que o mundo está sendo levado à beira de um desastre ecológico não por uma falha singular, que algum esquema inteligente pode corrigir, mas pela falange de poderosas forças econômicas, políticas e sociais que constituem a marcha da história. Quem se propõe a curar a crise ambiental compromete-se, assim, a mudar o curso da história.

Mas esta é uma competência reservada à própria história, pois a mudança social abrangente só pode ser planejada na oficina de ação social racional, informada e coletiva. Que devemos agir agora está claro. A questão que enfrentamos é comox.

Essa resposta é nosso desafio…

i planetary-boundaries

ii Egan, Michael, Barry Commoner and the science of survival : the remaking of American environmentalism, MIT Press, 2007.

iii Commoner, Barry, The Closing Circle – Nature, Man and Tecnology, New York : Alfred A, Knopf, 1971, pg. 144

iv Em The Coal Question (1865) Willian Jevons sustenta que as melhorias tecnológicas que aumentam a eficiência energética podem, ao invés de diminuir o consumo dos recursos, aumentá-lo, exatamente por serem mais eficazes.

v Commoner, Op. Cit. Pg. 145

vi idem. 156

vii Idem 169

viii Termo criado pelo militante dos direitos civis dr. Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr em 1981.

ix MARTINEZ-ALIER, Joan, O Ecologismo dos pobres: conflitos ambientais e linguagem de valoração, trad. Maurício Waldman, Contexto : São Paulo, 2015.

x Commoner, Op. Cit. Pg. 245

Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: Is There an Ecological Crisis?

As Quatro Leis da Ecologia, segundo Barry Commoner

1- Tudo está ligado com tudo o mais. Existe uma única ecosfera para todos os organismos vivos, e o que afeta um deles afecta a todos.

2- Tudo tem que ir para algum lado. Não existe «lixo» na natureza e não há nenhum «lá fora» para onde o possamos atirar.

3- A Natureza sabe mais e melhor. A ausência de uma substância específica na Natureza é muitas vezes sinal de que essa substância é incompatível com a química da vida.

4- Nada procede do nada. A exploração da Natureza acarreta sempre custos ecológicos, e esses custos são significativos.

no livro The Closing Circle, de 1971

Biografia
Wiki (EN) mais completa
Wiki (PT)

Scientist, Candidate and Planet Earth’s Lifeguard

                                   

Barry Commoner, a founder of modern ecology and one of its most provocative thinkers and mobilizers in making environmentalism a people’s political cause, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 95 and lived in Brooklyn Heights.

His wife, Lisa Feiner, confirmed his death.

Dr. Commoner was a leader among a generation of scientist-activists who recognized the toxic consequences of America’s post-World War II technology boom, and one of the first to stir the national debate over the public’s right to comprehend the risks and make decisions about them.

Raised in Brooklyn during the Depression and trained as a biologist at Columbia and Harvard, he came armed with a combination of scientific expertise and leftist zeal. His work on the global effects of radioactive fallout, which included documenting concentrations of strontium 90 in the baby teeth of thousands of children, contributed materially to the adoption of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

From there it was a natural progression to a range of environmental and social issues that kept him happily in the limelight as a speaker and an author through the 1960s and ’70s, and led to a wobbly run for president in 1980.

In 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, Time magazine put Dr. Commoner on its cover and called him the Paul Revere of Ecology. He was by no means the only one sounding alarms; the movement was well under way by then, building on the impact of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” in 1962 and the work of many others. But he was arguably the most peripatetic in his efforts to draw public attention to environmental dangers.

(The same issue of Time noted that President Richard M. Nixon had already signed on. In his State of the Union address that January, he said, “The great question of the ’70s is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?” And he followed through: Among other steps, the Environmental Protection Agency was established in December 1970.)

Dr. Commoner was an imposing professorial figure, with a strong face, heavy eyeglasses, black eyebrows and a thick head of hair that gradually turned pure white. He was much in demand as a speaker and a debater, especially on college campuses, where he helped supply a generation of activists with a framework that made the science of ecology accessible.

His four informal rules of ecology were catchy enough to print on a T-shirt and take to the street: Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Although the rules were plain enough, the thinking behind them required leaps of faith. Dr. Commoner’s overarching concern was not ecology as such but rather a radical ideal of social justice in which everything was indeed connected to everything else. Like some other left-leaning dissenters of his time, he believed that environmental pollution, war, and racial and sexual inequality needed to be addressed as related issues of a central problem.

A Critic of Capitalism

Having been grounded, as an undergraduate, in Marxist theory, he saw his main target as capitalist “systems of production” in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation that emphasized profits and technological progress with little regard for consequences: greenhouse gases, nonbiodegradable materials, and synthetic fertilizers and toxic wastes that leached into the water supply.

He insisted that the planet’s future depended on industry’s learning not to make messes in the first place, rather than on trying to clean them up. It followed, by his logic, that scientists in the service of industry could not merely invent some new process or product and then wash their hands of moral responsibility for the side effects. He was a lasting opponent of nuclear power because of its radioactive waste; he scorned the idea of pollution credit swaps because, after all, he said, an industry would have to be fouling the environment in the first place to be rewarded by such a program.

In a “Last Word” interview with The New York Times in 2006, videotaped to accompany this obituary online, Dr. Commoner elaborated on his holistic views and lamented the inability of society to connect the dots among its multitude of challenges, calling it “an unfortunate feature of political development in this country.”

Noting the success of movements that had promoted civil rights, sexual equality, organized labor, environmentalism and an end to the war in Vietnam, he said one might think that “if they would only get together, they could remake the country.” But, he added, that has not happened.

Then he said: “I don’t believe in environmentalism as the solution to anything. What I believe is that environmentalism illuminates the things that need to be done to solve all of the problems together. For example, if you’re going to revise the productive system to make cars or anything else in such a way as to suit the environmental necessities, at the same time why not see to it that women earn as much as men for the same work?”

Dr. Commoner’s diagnoses and prescriptions sometimes put him at odds with other environmental leaders. He is rightly remembered as an important figure in the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, a nationwide teach-in conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, and he himself regarded the observance as historically important. But Earth Day also illustrated the growing factionalization of a movement in which “environmentalism” comprised a number of agendas, all competing for attention and money, and could mean anything from ending the Vietnam War to growing one’s own cabbages.

That was the context for the rift between Dr. Commoner and advocates of population control, who saw environmental degradation as a byproduct of overpopulation. They had become a force on the strength of Paul R. Ehrlich’s huge best seller “The Population Bomb.” Conservationist groups like the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation were strong supporters of Dr. Ehrlich’s views.

Dr. Commoner took aim at the “neo-Malthusians,” as he called those who, like the English scholar Thomas Malthus, foresaw perils in population growth. In a panel discussion with Dr. Ehrlich in 1970, he said it was “a cop-out of the worst kind” to say that “none of our pollution problems can be solved without getting at population first.”

He elaborated in his best-known book, “The Closing Circle,” published the next year. Reducing population, Dr. Commoner wrote, was “equivalent to attempting to save a leaking ship by lightening the load and forcing passengers overboard.”

“One is constrained to ask if there isn’t something radically wrong with the ship.”

In the science establishment, Dr. Commoner’s standing was ambiguous. Along with eminent figures of the postwar years like the chemist Linus Pauling and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, he was concerned that the integrity of American science had been compromised — first by the government’s emphasis on supporting physics at the expense of other fields during the development of nuclear weapons, and second by the growing privatization of research, in which pure science took a back seat to projects that held short-range promise of marketable technologies.

It was a concern remarkably similar to that of the distinctly unradical Dwight D. Eisenhower, who warned of the dangerous power of “the military-industrial complex” as he was leaving the presidency. But although Dr. Commoner had a record of achievement as a cellular biologist and founding director of the government-financed Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, he was seen primarily as the advocate for a politics that relatively few considered practicable or even desirable. Among other positions, he advocated forgiveness of all third world debt, which he said would decrease poverty and despair and thus act as a natural curb on population growth.

His platform did not get him very far in the 1980 presidential race, which he entered as the head of his own Citizens’ Party. He won only about 234,000 votes as Ronald Reagan swept to victory. Dr. Commoner himself conceded that he would not have made a very good president. Still, he was angry that the questions he had raised had generated so little interest.

His own favorite moment of the campaign, he recalled many years later, was when a reporter in Albuquerque asked, “Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate, or are you just running on the issues?”

Barry Commoner was born on May 28, 1917, in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. His parents, the former Goldie Yarmolinsky and Isidore Commoner, were Jewish immigrants from Russia, his father a tailor until he went blind. (The original family name, Comenar, was Anglicized at the suggestion of an uncle of Barry’s, Avrahm Yarmolinsky, chief of the Slavonic department at the New York Public Library.)

Young Barry grew up at a time when it was possible to be both a tough street kid and a studious sort. He spent hours in Prospect Park collecting bits of nature, which he took home to inspect under a microscope that Uncle Avrahm had given him.

He was so shy at James Madison High School that he was referred to a speech correction class, and after graduation he set out on the track of a quiet academic career. With money earned from odd jobs, he put himself through Columbia, earning honors in his major, zoology; election to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi; and a B.A. degree in 1937, at 20. He went on to do graduate work at Harvard, where he got a Ph.D. in cellular biology. He taught for two years at Queens College and served in the Naval Air Corps in World War II, rising to lieutenant. In 1947 he joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis.

Role in Nuclear Test Ban

Parallel to his life as a public figure, Dr. Commoner had a reputation as a brilliant teacher and a painstaking researcher into viruses, cell metabolism and the effects of radiation on living tissue. A research team he led was the first to show that abnormal free radicals — groups of molecules with unpaired electrons — might be the earliest indicator of cancer in laboratory rats.

He found his political voice when he encountered the indifference of government authorities to the high levels of strontium 90 in the atmosphere from atomic tests. Quite simply, he said in an interview with The Chicago Tribune in 1993, “The Atomic Energy Commission turned me into an environmentalist.”

He helped organize the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information in 1958, and was eventually its president. Dr. Commoner told Scientific American years later that the committee’s task “was to explain to the public — first in St. Louis and then nationally — how splitting a few pounds of atoms could turn something as mild as milk into a devastating global poison.”

“At about that time,” he continued, “several of us met with Linus Pauling in St. Louis and together drafted the petition, eventually signed by thousands of scientists worldwide.” The petition was part of the scientific underpinning for President John F. Kennedy’s proposal of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 — “the first of continuing international actions to fully cage the nuclear beast,” Dr. Commoner said.

As the founding director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems in St. Louis, he led a staff drawn from many disciplines in investigating, among other things, lead poisoning in slums, the ecology of ghetto rats, the economics of conventional versus organic farming, and the pollution of rivers by fertilizer leaching.

Dr. Commoner moved the center from St. Louis to Queens College in 1981. He remained in the thick of things, helping to set up New York City’s trash recycling program and defending it against critics like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had declared the recycling law irresponsible.

In 2000, at 82, Dr. Commoner gave up the center’s directorship to concentrate on new research projects, including work on the effects of genetically altering organisms.

Waning Influence

By then he was no longer getting anything like the attention he had enjoyed in earlier times. Some experts had begun to think that his view of the planet, as a place harmoniously balanced by the trial and error of long evolution, left out too much complexity and too much potential for the unexpected.

Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, reviewing Dr. Commoner’s book “Making Peace With the Planet” for The Times in 1990, said that it “suffers the commonest of unkind fates: to be so self-evidently true and just that we pass it by as a twice-told tale.”

“Although he has been branded by many as a maverick,” Dr. Gould added, “I regard him as right and compassionate on nearly every major issue.”

Dr. Commoner married Ms. Feiner in 1980. He is also survived by two children, Lucy Commoner and Frederic, by his first wife, the former Gloria Gordon; and one granddaughter.

Dr. Commoner practiced what he preached. In his personal habits he was as frugal as a Yankee farmer, and as common-sensical. He drove or took taxis if the route by public transit took him far out of his way. On the other hand, he saw no need to waste electricity by ironing his shirts.

And when a Times writer once asked his Queens College office to mail some material, it arrived in an old brown envelope with the crossed-out return address of the botany department at Washington University — where he had last worked 19 years earlier.

Contracção Económica

Just like peak oil and global warming, economic contraction is a "game changer." As the economy we now know crumbles, the far-reaching repercussions will sculpt every aspect of our future. In my opinion, any long-term plan -- Transition EDAPs included -- must anticipate that it will unfold amidst a world of economic contraction. We have to plan for it, and put alternative financial tools in place to weather it, or it will undermine all of our other efforts.

This post is an excerpt from a longer paper, "Economic Resilience," which is being posted online in serial form. Part I (this post) explains the problems, because we have to understand what we are working with in order to begin to solve it. Part II critiques what several economic theorists see as possible routes forward for the “big picture” economy. But the central question of this document is what we can do at the grassroots level. Part III (approximately 70% of the document) offers a panorama of ideas for building local economic resilience. 

SEEING THROUGH THE SMOKESCREENS

"The scale of denial is breathtaking." --Jerry Mander

It might appear that there are very contrasting takes on what is happening in the economy, but remember there are all kinds of commentaries denying peak oil and global warming as well -- and the well-informed can see the gaping holes in the arguments. It takes self-study and work to learn to see through the smokescreens that have been painstakingly erected to obscure the stark realities.

Just as in the field of global warming where there are individuals who are well paid to distribute bad science to "prove" that global warming isn't human caused, just as the companies who stand to profit on oil don't want to admit it has peaked, there is a similarly enormous financial incentive for people to declare that there will be a lasting "recovery" - that growth will resume, and that collapse fears are unpatriotic (so we should all go shopping).

In economics, it takes more than work to see the holes in their arguments -- it takes raw courage. With the economic issue in particular, each one of us is wrapped up in it. It is our bread-and-butter, it is the roof over our heads, and it can be truly horrifying to look deeply. Perhaps four, maybe five years ago, I followed a link from one of Hopkins' pieces to an article by a different author who referred to "the triple crisis" of global warming, peak oil, and economic collapse. That was the first time I'd ever heard it put that way. At that time my stomach turned. I actually felt sick for a few weeks.

At that time I was simultaneously reading the work of Robert Prechter, Warren Buffett and Sy Harding. Prechter taught about the Fibonacci patterns and the effect that the rise and fall of cumulative human emotions builds into every market -- that after the exhilarating crest, there is an inevitable fall. Buffett taught readers to analyze the underlying fundamentals -- yet in company after company that I was testing at the time, his formulas proved out; the companies were already ridiculously overvalued for their underlying worth. At a time when the front pages of the newspapers were celebrating the nosebleed pinnacle of stock gains, Prechter and Harding wrote of preparing for the great bear market.

In my presentations here in Southern California, when I do the part of my talks where I explain the problems we face, I present it as "the triple crisis."

In the Totnes EDAP, Hopkins indicates his acceptance of "the end of economic growth" as part of the triple crisis that affects every aspect of our future course. But what we face goes far beyond “the end of growth.” By the end of this piece, I think you will see that the economy as we know it today is inevitably going to contract, grow smaller, "powerdown."

Whether it will be a full-scale collapse into chaos like Jared Diamond writes about or Stoneleigh forecasts , or whether we will be successful in creating locally-managed "surge breakers" in time, remains to be seen. But either way, we'd better try our best to get something in place.

POSSIBLE WAYS OFF THE MOUNTAIN

“Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”-Kenneth E. Boulding

I usually begin the economics portion of my talks with an overview: that we're coping with a triple crisis. I follow that with a detailed view of each of the three elements:

(1) Climate change: what the Union of Concerned Scientists forecasts for climate change here in my state of California;

(2) Peak oil: what ASPO, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the International Energy Agency anticipate as the future of petroleum, together with possible repercussions as outlined by Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunsler and company. Peak oil is really a subset of “peak everything.”

(3) Economic contraction: more on this in a moment.

Over the course of industrialized civilization we have experienced an enormous assent of consumption of raw materials and consumption of energy. In his Energy Descent diagram, David Holmgren depicts this as the climb up the mountain. Right now, at the peak of the mountain, what are our options? What are the possible ways forward?

The first option, the orange line, “Techno-fantasy,” is the business-as-usual, eternal growth scenario. It says We’ll just keep going the way we are now, with more of the same. Keep on shopping! Don’t worry that we don’t have the oil to keep going like this, we’ll just send an army over and conquer the country that has it ... We’ve heard this one before, and you’ll note the word “fantasy” in the name.

The second scenario, the “Green Tech Stability” model, says Okay, we know that eternal growth isn’t possible, so we’ll ditch the growth idea. We’ll just continue along at a reasonable level, kind of steady, right where we are now. So we’re running out of oil: we’ll use wind and solar and biofuels and all that renewable stuff to replace it.

But there are some serious problems with this Green Tech proposal. One is the idea of energy density: oil gives us tremendous power, and no combination of renewables can possibly replace what it does for us. The second is timing: those renewables aren’t in place now, in anywhere near sufficient quantities, to avoid the pain of energy shortages. We will still have to powerdown.

The third problem is that our entire economy is built upon the presumption of everlasting growth. Everything from our stock market to our accounting systems is founded upon the premise that growth is good and lack of growth is failure. Thus even the adjustment from that steeply ascending line to the flat line is a very significant one. We will feel the ouch. The fourth is the “peak everything” issue. There is a serious problem with the level at which we declare that stability (but we’ll get into that in Part II). For those four reasons, we should be calling this a Green Tech fantasy scenario.

The third scenario, the red line, is the Crash scenario, the Mad Max scenario, the collapse of civilization as we know it. This is what happens if we keep on going with the Techno-fantasy and ignore the problem a little longer. Now, I have two children; I say, there’s got to be a better alternative than this.

Holmgren presents another scenario, the Energy Descent scenario. This scenario says we can take the boundless creativity that got us up the mountain and apply it toward actively designing a careful way down. This is the approach that the Transition movement embraces.

It is very important to understand that inherent in the Energy Descent scenario is the downhill slope – the understanding that there must be a descent. There must be a powerdown. There must be a significant decrease in consumption overall. And as you will see in the following discussion, that means there will inevitably be a severe contraction in our economic systems.

A BASIC EXPLANATION: ECONOMICS

We have an economic system that is based entirely upon the presumption that growth will be ongoing, unceasing, and unlimited. This in turn requires ever more extraction from the earth. Thus at the most basic level, our tour of economics begins with biocapacity, a.k.a. global footprint.

Global footprint is how much raw materials we use and how much waste we generate, compared to how fast the planet can make more resources and clean up the mess in the same time period. Humanity as a whole has been using more resources and generating more waste than the planet can make and clean up. It is called ecological overshoot and we have been moving deeper into this state since the 1970s. Humanity is simultaneously experiencing peak oil, peak natural gas, peak coal, peak copper, peak uranium, peak phosphorus, peak fresh water, peak arable land, and more. Richard Heinberg calls it “peak everything.”

It gets even worse when we look at it by continent. Again, if we take all the "stuff" there is on the planet -- all the fresh water, all the arable land, all the fisheries, all the forests, all the energy resources and more -- and we divide it up by the number of people we have here today, we get a figure we can call our "fair share."

Our fair share is 2.1 hecatres (they measure this stuff in an equivalency unit called "bioproductive acres"). Humanity as a whole uses on average 2.23 hecatres. 2.23 world average consumption is bigger than our 2.1 fair share. Right there you can see the ecological overshoot.

Here in North America, we consume at a rate of a whopping 9.4 hecatres. That is nearly five times our fair share. In other words, if everyone on the planet consumed the way we do -- the way we tell each other is "normal" -- it would take FIVE PLANETS to provide for it all.

At this point in my talks, I often throw five earth beach balls out at the audience. It makes a lasting impression.

All this means that we would have to go to six, seven, eight planets-worth-of-consumption in order to "grow" this economy.

It's quite clear we cannot do that.

FIVE-PLANETS-WORTH-OF-CONSUMPTION

There are three ways in which North Americans have managed to live at five-planets-worth-of-consumption. I am indebted to Sophy Banks and Naresh Giangrande for an explanation in the Transition Training here in Los Angeles in 2008, which really broadened my understanding.

“Ghost acres” – taking from others. We have raped and pillaged the raw materials of other continents (leaving the people who live on those continents with far less than their fair share). We’ve consumed those goods here and persuaded each other that they were rightfully ours.

“Draw down” -- taking from the future. As we desecrate ancient forests and deplete fisheries, we are consuming today that which should be our children’s inheritance.

“Ancient sunlight” – taking from the past. Fossil fuels – oil, gas, coal – are captured ancient sunlight. In the space of a mere 150 or so years out of the entire history of humanity, we are gobbling up and consuming the entire planetary supply.

We have an economic system that is entirely dependent upon taking from others, taking from the future, and taking from the ancient past. This economic system is built upon the presumption of everlasting growth. Thus in order to keep it going (keep it growing) we must take more from others, take more from the future, and take more from the ancient past.

Peak oil is the laws of physics telling us it is no longer possible to take more from the ancient past. Biocapacity is the laws of physics telling us it won’t be possible for much longer to take from the future. “War that will not end in our lifetimes” is a sign that taking from others has maxed out.

We are at the end of growth. We're actually beyond the end of growth into the beginning of economic contraction.

THE BEGINNING OF CONTRACTION

"Understandably, everyone wants it to get “back to normal.” But here’s a disturbing thought: What if that is not possible? What if the goalposts have been moved, the rules rewritten, the game changed?"

--Richard Heinberg

Hopkins has written about peak oil that "to argue that within 2 years, peak oil will be an issue of “who lives” is a lazy way to describe it and an unhelpful sweeping generalization. Some places won’t feel much of an impact at all for years."

In similar fashion, biocapacity and the limits to economic growth are already being painfully felt in some places, while in other places people might have the luxury cushion to go on pretending it isn't so for several more years. Right now, people in some of the affluent social circles around me continue to carry on in denial. Discussions of the issues in this document seem absolutely absurd to them. After all, the newspapers say “the economy is recovering.”

Yet we can't pretend away the indicators all around us. The fact that we are severely overextended is showing up not just in our ecological systems, but in our human ones as well. There are no Buffett fundamentals to support the notion of "economic recovery." In fact the very substance that should be there is hollow.

It calls to mind the times when rats get into my grapefruit tree. They bore a small hole in one side of the fruit, then crawl inside and eat all the flesh. You’re left with an empty, hollowed-out rind dangling there on the tree.

Stoneleigh points out how our current economic "growth" figures include tons of transactions which are entirely built upon credit and financial instruments. There isn't any substance to them.

The substance that supports many of our conventional economic transactions is rapidly depleting. Peak oil promises absolutely staggering economic implications. Already we've seen a doubling of retail gasoline prices over the past three or so years, and the ramifications of that are still playing out across the market. Fed Ex costs more, postage costs more, moving everything around the surface of the planet costs more. Food costs a lot more. And we’re just getting started.

Peak oil will mean the end to globalization as we have known it thus far. Right now we call it “normal” to harvest raw materials on one continent, to ship them to another continent for manufacture, and to still another continent for sale. This absurd extravagance -- only possible with plentiful cheap oil – is at its end. So too is the globalized economy that was built around it.

Conventional wisdom says it takes about three years for an oil shock to play out across the financial markets. We’re not yet three years out from $147 a barrel in July 2008, thus we’ve barely seen the full array of impacts, and prices are climbing back over $108 for the second time. Oil industry representatives are now publicly stating that prices will go much higher. As oil (and now potentially coal too) becomes more precious, this volatility will only exacerbate the existing market instabilities.

Further evidence of the empty, hollowed-out rind:

Government: Our government is in dire straights: our California and Los Angeles city budgets are completely upside down, forcing them to slash programs across the board. Our national debt just reached an all-time record high. As I write this, each citizen’s share of the national debt -- YOUR share -- is $45,959. The decreased tax base due to other economic factors will only exacerbate the plight of our government in coming years.

Consumers: Our unemployment rate would display far higher if it weren't for the fact that people's term of unemployment is now exceeding the maximum term over which they can receive benefits, thus they are disappearing from unemployment statistics. (the 99ers) The long-term jobless are no longer counted in the newspaper statistics, but that doesn't mean they now have jobs and their pain is behind them. Many have given up on finding a job. Others who have managed to find work are now underemployed, earning far less than their skills once merited. The number of Americans on food stamps is rising, and so is the demand at food banks. A recent report indicated that 20% of families in California struggled to afford food last year, and 18% of Americans.

Labor: We have an aging population demographic, with increasing numbers of retirement-age individuals, and social security sliding into permanent deficit. We have an obesity epidemic among our youth. These signal increasing hope for oil-intense medical care, which we won’t be able to supply. All this means decreasing numbers of able-bodied adults to perform post-petroleum manual labor. Who will create that "more" for this supposedly growing economy?

Social: The rate of emotional depression in the U.S. has increased more than tenfold in the last fifty years. Some thinkers declare that Western society is in the grip of a “social recession.” Our population has a psychological and spiritual sense of "maxed out.”

James Gustave Speth quotes the United Nations Development Programme’s 1996 report (which, rather than being outdated, indicates how very long our society has been desperately off track). This report lists several ways that economic performance has gone sideways:

• Jobless growth – where the overall economy grows but does not expand the opportunities for employment;
• Ruthless growth – where the fruits of economic growth mostly benefit the rich;
• Voiceless growth – where growth in the economy has not been accompanied by an extension of democracy or empowerment;
• Rootless growth – where growth causes people’s cultural identity to wither;
• Futureless growth – where the present generation squanders resources needed by future generations.

Our economy is indeed that empty, hollowed-out rind dangling on the tree, without substance, without the materials for “more”.

Every market is an accumulation of human emotions. From the tulip mania of 1637 to the Dow Jones of today, mass human enthusiasm drives market values higher; mass human distrust and fear pulls economic values down. (Robert Prechter has written entire books about this.)

When we look at the emotions of a market, we see where we are. We all heard the "new paradigm" a few years back when media broadcast that it would only get better. That was right before the first plunge. In denial, we now desperately search for signs of "recovery."

To which Stoneleigh declares with bright sarcasm: "Those green shoots of recovery? That would be gangrene!"

I don't know about you, but around me there is lots of fear. In my Pacific Region, the Consumer Confidence index recently hit a record low. We're in a momentary time when people desperately home that we're "returning to normal." It's clear where we are on the emotions-of-a-market chart. And we can see what lies ahead.

Early Transition materials encouraged us to listen to the elders. Around here, members of the generation that experienced the Depression of the 1930s have been telling us "hold on to your cash." It looks just like they saw before.

Transition movement commentary on the economy

• Rob Hopkins, “Economics addition to The Transition Handbook”

Joanne Poyourow is the initiator who brought the ideas of the international Transition movement to many areas of Los Angeles. She is actively involved in the Transition Los Angeles city hub. She was a CPA in public practice for more than 13 years and holds a degree in Business Economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara

Recente relatório sobre Nuclear, da Union of Concerned Scientists conclui que energia nuclear continua inviável, mesmo com subsídios estatais

Descarrega aqui: Nuclear Power: Still Not Viable without Subsidies (2011) | Nuclear Power Subsidies: Executive Summary (2011)

Publicado em 15/02/11

Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past fifty years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away, according to a February 2011 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The report, Nuclear Power: Still Not Viable without Subsidies, looks at the economic impacts and policy implications of subsidies to the nuclear power industry—past, present, and proposed.

How would you like your subsidy?

Read More

Report Recommendations Financial Risk of Subsidies Read the Press Release

Nuclear power subsidies vary by type of ownership (public or private), time frame of support (legacy, ongoing, or new), and the type of cost (or “attribute of production”) they address—from startup capital to decommissioning and waste disposal. Subsidies can take many forms, including tax breaks, accident liability caps, direct payments, and loan guarantees.

While the exact value of these subsidies can be difficult to pin down, even conservative estimates add up to a substantial percentage of the value of the power nuclear plants produce—approaching or even exceeding 100 percent in the case of legacy subsidies and subsidies to new privately-owned reactors (see chart).

Subsidies prove addictive

Subsidies were originally intended to provide temporary support for the fledgling nuclear power industry, but the promised day when the industry could prosper without them and power from nuclear reactors would be “too cheap to meter” has yet to arrive. It is unlikely to arrive any time soon, as cost estimates for new reactors continue to escalate and the nuclear power lobby demands even more support from taxpayers. Piling new subsidies on top of existing ones will provide the industry with little incentive to rework its business model to internalize its considerable costs and risks. 

Subsidy impacts: Public risks and hidden costs

Nuclear subsidies effectively separate risk from reward, shifting the burden of possible losses onto the public and encouraging speculative investment. By masking the true cost of nuclear power, subsidies also allow the industry to exaggerate its economic competitiveness; consequently, they diminish or delay support for more economical and less risky alternatives like energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Recommendations

The report concludes with a dozen recommendations for policymakers, including reducing subsidies to existing reactors, adopting market-oriented approaches to uranium mining royalties and waste management financing, and incorporating the costs of preventing nuclear proliferation and terrorism into economic assessments of new reactors.

Mapa Mundial e Interactivo do Aquecimento Global

About the map [link here]

Global temperature in 1998 was the hottest in the historical record, and the temperature increase over the 20th century is likely to be the highest of the past millennium. Global average temperatures have warmed about one degree Fahrenheit (0.6 C) since 1900. The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1987, seven of them since 1994.

This map illustrates the local consequences of global warming.

Events indicated on the map are divided into two categories:

• Fingerprints. Some of the events are direct manifestations of a widespread and long-term trend toward warmer global temperatures, as already documented and projected to continue by models of a changing climate. These "fingerprints" of climate change are indicated with yellow icons.
• Harbingers. The map also identifies events that foreshadow the types of impacts likely to become more frequent and widespread with continued warming. These "harbingers" of climate change are indicated with red icons. For these events, evidence for a direct link to long-term climate change cannot be confirmed or ruled out at this time.

Dr. Sharon Locke of the University of Southern Maine and Dr. Susanne Moser of the Union of Concerned Scientists researched, categorized, and described the events featured on this world map and completed a map update in January 2003 based on the latest scientific findings. This updated map builds on work originally undertaken by the Sierra Club and extended by Dr. Janine Bloomfield and Molly Smith of Environmental Defense and Dr. Sharon Locke for the first edition, published in 1999. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has developed background materials on the map for scientists and map curriculum materials for high school teachers.

Dr. John Harte, Dr. Richard Moss, Dr. Stephen Schneider, Dr. Anthony Janetos, and Dr. Janine Bloomfield provided scientific peer review at various stages of compiling and updating the map.

The World Resources Institute oversaw the production of the printed version of the map and undertook the design and construction of this web site. In January 2003, the Union of Concerned Scientists updated the website to reflect the new map points.

Support for this project has been generously provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The printed version of the map and the graphic images used on this web site were designed by Cutting Edge Graphics, and modified by Kamenko Pajic at UCS.

For additional information sources and links, see "Contact us", "Organizations", and "References."

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The following organizations produced GLOBAL WARMING: Early Warning Signs:
Environmental Defense Natural Resources Defense Council Sierra Club Union of Concerned Scientists	U.S. Public Interest Research Group World Resources Institute World Wildlife Fund