Against hopeless sorrow: a review of The Flooded Earth

NB: Also published in slightly altered form on Climate & Capitalism

Paleontologist Peter D. Ward’s The Flooded Earth (Basic Books, 2010) is similar in many ways to a number of other books published in recent years that have examined aspects of scientific findings regarding potential future anthropogenic climate change or the environmental crisis generally conceived: it reviews a number of important data and considerations regarding the the terminal implications climate change could have for the Earth’s polar ice caps but includes highly reactionary socio-political reflections on this most troubling of issues. If the dissident German psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich is correct to note that the “consequences” of “serious scientific insight” can be “very often revolutionary”¹—if it is the case that the responsibility which accompanies knowledge of impending climate catastrophe “weighs,” in Marx’s words, “like a nightmare on the brains of the living”²—it is toward Ward’s exegesis of climatology rather than his political analysis that attention should be focused.

Ward opens The Flooded Earth by noting that the highest estimated sea-level rise expected to take place this century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 Fourth Annual Report (4AR)—less than 1 meter—is based on rather conservative predictions regarding the possible future rise in the rate of emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases during the course of the twenty-first century—an eventuality that could come to pass, that is, if no “global self-conscious subject develops and intervenes.”³ In the first place Ward revises the IPCC’s estimate to 2100 by bringing to light the likely 1-3m global rise in sea levels that would accompany a 1m rise in sea levels by means of devastating storm surges that would themselves be driven by warmer oceans and a generally warmer atmosphere. Beyond this, though, Ward criticizes reliance on projections of sea-level rise that stop at 2100, given that sea-levels could well continue to rise beyond that date. In Ward’s mind, it is entirely possible that Earth’s atmospheric carbon concentration could reach 800 or even 1000 parts per million by the end of this century or the next—these being concentrations that would undoubtedly cause the icesheets of both Greenland and Antarctica to begin terminal melt. Examining the Earth’s geological record, Ward finds it possible that sea levels could well rise some 5m this century toward a total of 80m over centuries if both ice caps disappear entirely.

Clearly, a 4-5m rise in prevailing sea levels in the near term would be entirely disastrous for much of currently existing humanity. Besides directly removing vast swathes of land from agricultural production through inundation—one thinks of the Brahmaputra-Ganges river basin and the Mekong and Nile deltas—such catastrophic sea-level rises would further cripple the human prospect by provoking mass-intrusion of salt-water into aquifers that could otherwise provide for agriculture. Ward grimly adds that the severity of climate change that would provoke mass-inundation the world over would itself be catastrophic in other regards: atmospheric carbon concentrations of 1000 ppm would also have desertified vast swathes of Earth and likely rendered the oceans largely anoxic producers of hydrogen sulfide. Such a degree of climate catastrophe would surely imply unprecedented human suffering, mass-death, and a precipitous decline in global human population; Ward may indeed be being too charitable when he asserts that such changes would amount to a death sentence for “some proportion of humanity.” An imagined future-scenario of which he writes that has India’s military employ nuclear weapons against a multitude of dispossessed Bangladeshis who flood into the country after having torn down the separation barrier between the two countries remains a possibility that should not be discounted, similar in this sense to one presented by Gwynne Dyer in his Climate Wars (2008) which sees India and Pakistan engage in a nuclear exchange over contested water resources.

Whatever the social value of Ward’s review of scientific findings regarding potential future sea-level rise and the climate crisis writ large, it must be said that the consideration of horror which drives The Flooded Earth in no way leads Ward to propose reasonable or worthwhile reflections on the climate predicament: instead, he most certainly perpetuates alienation in the analysis he shares with readers of his work. For example, Ward rather mindlessly postulates there to exist “no conceivable political means” by which the global South can avert producing energy through coal in the near term, and he reproduces the disastrous patterns of Western capitalism into the imagined future by asserting that private-automobile use will necessarily increase astronomically among Southerners in the coming decades. In the work’s final chapter, indeed, Ward mimics James Lovelock in calling for a Platonic technocracy to forcibly impose the “necessary changes” that he claims can be employed toward preventing climate destabilization—none of which, it should be noted, include the abolition of capitalism. Ward’s proposed platform of unreason includes heavy reliance on geo-engineering schemes and rather absurdly finds human population growth to be the single most important factor that will determine the severity of future climate change. It follows, then, that Ward would suggest that perhaps the “only way” of “effectively” averting climate catastrophe would be to “lower human population.”

Ward’s outrageous populationism and his attendant blindness to systemic considerations are one with the racism he exhibits in much of the text. In an imagined future-scenario Ward provides at the beginning of a chapter entitled “The Flood of Humans” that proffers the reflections of an aging geologist (Ward himself, most likely) regarding a visit to conduct research in the deserts of Tunisia in 2060 CE, the man is shown as noting that “hunger” is “almost visible” on the faces of impoverished locals, who despite their plight have been spared the “check on overpopulation” he finds HIV/AIDS to have constituted in many other African countries. In light of these reactionary perspectives, it is to be imagined that the Tunisian children Ward describes as pestering and thus interrupting his work—“skinny sacks of bones, with little energy”—are not to be considered within such a racist-Orientalist constellation to be subjects capable of intervening in history and overthrowing tyrants or systems of horror. Fortunately for Tunisians and humanity in general, Ward is mistaken in this sense, as shown for example in the mass-popular mobilizations which succeeded in ousting long-time dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali just weeks ago: instead of provoking catastrophic climate change that would cause sea-levels to rise precipitously as well as destroy much of life itself, humanity can “do something else”⁴—it can, in the words of Ernst Bloch, “become-other.”⁵

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1The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. 170

2The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

3Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983 [1962])

4John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto, 2010), p. 86

5The Principle of Hope vol. 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986 [1959]), p. 232

Is Deus Ex anarchist?

To my comrade G, for first having brought Deus Ex to my attention some years ago

NB: The following contains a great number of revelations regarding the happenings in Deus Ex

While reservations should surely be had regarding the place of simulated reality in the current world—and in particular with regard to computer and video games—it is not necessarily the case that all such simulations reproduce hegemonic social relations. Such an assertion should not of course be taken as belittling the highly destructive role that the vast majority of such simulations have had, especially on contemporary youth: little can be said in favor of games that have users create empires, enslave and exterminate other peoples (or players), or employ nuclear weapons—as a great number of games heretofore created allow for and even encourage. Nonetheless, games, like film, can rebel against the monstrosities that prevail today, following the long-established ascendancy of alienated existence, thus helping perhaps to introduce or develop within users oppositional perspectives to the actual world in which they find themselves. Deus Ex, a computer game released in 2000 that explores a highly dystopian future, arguably does precisely this; it can even be said that the game advances anarchist perspectives on society.

Players of Deus Ex take on the role of JC Denton, who at the beginning of the game works as a special agent for UNATCO, the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition. A “planned organism,” JC, ‘brother’ to UNATCO special agent Paul Denton, was in fact created in a lab at Area 51, where, as had been done some years earlier with Paul, he was engineered using highly experimental methods that would eventually allow his handlers to equip him with nanoaugmentations—special abilities that would greatly enhance his ability to kill for UNATCO, thus becoming their “superweapon.”

Constituted power in Deus Ex is shown to be horrific in its maxims and behavior. Beyond the specific case of JC and Paul Denton, created by a “cabal of technophiles” who would even manipulate “the chemistry of our bodies” in their desire for power, world society in Deus Ex is depicted as being strongly hierarchical, with highly militarized institutions dominating “the underclasses,” who in large part seem to be materially impoverished and socially excluded; the various homeless individuals encountered by JC in New York City attest to this, as does the community of so-called Mole People who, forgotten by the rest of society, reside in tunnels below the city. The peoples of the world in Deus Ex are threatened by the Gray Death, a highly lethal virus produced by the Versalife Corporation, which also holds as its intellectual property the vaccine Ambrosia designed as an antidote to the virus. Resistance against the depredations of Versalife come by means of the “terrorist” National Secessionist Force (NSF), which at the opening of the game has taken control of a number of Ambrosia vials so as to distribute them to “the people.” As is to be expected from the State, JC Denton is ordered by UNATCO to recover the expropriated Ambrosia, in the process killing or rendering-unconscious a great number of NSF operatives (players can choose to employ non-lethal tactics against those who would oppose JC’s actions). While searching for the Ambrosia containers, JC learns that his brother Paul has in fact been aiding the NSF for some time, following his discovery that the Gray Death virus was indeed developed consciously by humans for repressive-genocidal purposes. Paul’s defection to the NSF sets in motion a frantic man-hunt by UNATCO, during which Paul suggests to JC that he “join the resistance” by sending a distress signal to his French counterparts from the radical group Silhouette.

Heeding Paul’s recommendations, JC sends word to Silhouette, and subsequently joins his brother as a wanted man; he is eventually captured and taken to a UNATCO prison, following the activation of a 24-hour “kill-switch” introduced into his body by his developers. JC is aided in his escape by the rebellious artificial intelligence construct known as Daedalus, a being originally developed to process data for constituted power, and comes to meet computer specialist Tracer Tong in Hong Kong, who deactivates his kill-switch. Hong Kong, of course, is the site of a major investigative center maintained by Versalife; JC breaks into this facility, there to witness the macabre experiments and research carried out by scientists working for the corporation: the development of ‘transgenic’ beings, testing on humans, and so on. JC is guided by Daedalus and Tong to the location of the Universal Constructor in the Versalife building that is used for the production of the Gray Death virus and, in a Hegelian reversal, destroys it.

JC’s resistance activities against Versalife, denounced by UNATCO as terrorism, take him to Paris, where he meets members of Silhouette, a revolutionary association made up of “intellectuals, artists, and labor organizers” who have for some time been emitting subversive communiques to the public via their so-called Ministry for True Lies—an amalgam of Orwell and Situationism. By the time JC reaches them they have resorted to hiding in the catacombs of Paris, threatened as they are by their association with JC and the NSF during the events depicted in the game, which follow the blame placed on them for the bombing of the Statue of Liberty of New York—an act that is revealed as having been perpetrated by UNATCO precisely to justify their establishment and ill-fated expansion. During this time at least, Silhouette’s left-Hegelian motto of Tandis qu’ils dorment, nous gagnerons (“while they sleep, we prevail”) seems rather out of place, as do similarly optimistic accounts in the present day, barring the option of engaging in the revolutionary resolution at game’s end, as discussed below. Silhouette’s ties to the Illuminati, the purported group of super-wealthy elites that in fact appear in the world of Deus Ex, are quizzical, given the highly conflicting visions of the two groups: a ludic social anarchism against the restoration of “twentieth-century capitalism: a corporate elite protected by laws and tax-codes,” as Paul Denton has it. It may be that Silhouette believes it needs the Illuminati to succeed in the struggle against UNATCO and the monstrous totality it defends, but any victory in which such an elite group holds sway would surely be no victory at all; capitalists are not to be included in the multitude.¹

The dreams of those who in the world of Deus Ex militantly oppose the existent—as well, indeed, as those who rage against it in the actual world—could perhaps be said to be embodied in one of the paths by which the game can be ended, when JC travels to California to liberate a formerly abandoned Air-Force base at which a group of dissident scientists have constructed an alternative Universal Constructor, one that could be used to mass-produce a cure to the Gray Death. After defeating the occupying force of robots and highly trained soldiers, JC proceeds to his place of birth, Area 51, to confront the owner of Versalife, Bob Page, who is attempting to merge his being with that of Helios, an artificial construct created through Page’s efforts to bind Daedalus to his nefarious successor, Icarus. Players are faced with the choice of killing Page and joining the Illuminati in their quest to “govern the world”; merging with Helios; or, as recommended by Tracer Tong, inducing a reaction in the facility’s nuclear core that would destroy the world’s central electronic-communications hub, known as Aquinas, which is located at Area 51. This last option would, in Tong’s estimation, radically disrupt the centralization of power that follows from the ability to control and censor global communications, as allowed by prevailing technologies; Tong states that destroying Aquinas could bring about “government on a scale comprehensible to its citizens” and “genuine self-rule.” Humanity would be afforded the chance to “start again,” to develop “a new moral philosophy.”

This third option, which borders on being primitivist, is surprising for its radicality. Confronted with the profoundly horrible nature of the world as upheld by hegemonic power, players of Deus Ex are granted the option of exploding world-destructive inequality and hierarchy at a stroke. Such a perspective militates against that of social democracy and reformism generally vis-à-vis the world’s political predicament, whether that of Deus Ex or of the present world; surely only revolution can be considered the deus ex machina by which exit and survival are assured.

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1Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000) and Multitude (2005)

Angst and hope amidst the prospect of climate catastrophe: a review of James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren

NB: this article first saw public light on Countercurrents in December 2009

Published in the U.S. last December with the intention that its release coincide with the beginning of the Copenhagen climate summit, James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity has an impressive-sounding title, however less than impressive its content at times is. Currently a professor at Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen is a world-renowned climatologist widely regarded as having been instrumental in bringing the specter of anthropogenic climate change to public attention with his remarks on the question before the U.S. Congress in the late 1980s, and he has engaged in lesser and greater forms of public advocacy on climate issues since then: he has denounced the liberal-parliamentary process for its failures meaningfully to address climate change to date,¹ written an open letter to U.S. President Obama stressing the absolute imperative of taking urgent action on climate change within the new president’s first term,² been arrested at a protest against mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia,³ and most recently seen what he calls the “fundamentally wrong” approach taken at the current Copenhagen negotiations as necessitating the summit’s failure.⁴ Hansen is, then, a decidedly important voice whose contributions should be thoughtfully considered; as we shall see, though, his Storms of My Grandchildren is flawed in many ways, despite the rationality of many of its claims.

In Storms, Hansen casts himself in the role of a “witness”: someone, he quotes Robert Pool as saying, who “believes he [or she] has information so important that he [or she] cannot keep silent.” As a witness, his general claim is that, due to the historical and contemporary mass burning of fossil fuels, “Planet Earth […] is in imminent peril,” “in imminent danger of crashing.” Hansen finds the urgency of the matter to be absolute: the very survival of humanity and millions of non-human species is in question. He spends much of the book reviewing the evidence for climate change, finding human-induced contributions to increased average global temperatures to be in “total dominance” over naturally occurring ones; as such, he claims those who deny such realities—global-warming contrarians, as Hansen refers to them—to have no basis for their views. In reflecting on the seriousness of the present situation, Hansen reserves much of his ire for what he calls “scientific reticence”—positivistic approaches that undermine the relevance and necessity of applying the precautionary principle as well as a marked reluctance among individuals knowledgeable about the present predicament to take public stands on this most important of issues. His discourse, furthermore, mirrors a growing disappointment among self-styled progressives with the ascendancy of the Obama administration in the U.S.: Obama, in Hansen’s estimation, “does not get it,” and Obama’s approach of greenwashed compromise is seen here as fundamentally flawed, since, as Hansen writes, “nature and the laws of physics cannot compromise.”

The gravity of the present situation notwithstanding, Hansen believes that hope for a “brighter future” has not yet been entirely stifled. Transitioning from the current atmospheric carbon concentration of 387 parts per million to the “appropriate initial target” Hansen finds in 350 ppm is in his view still practically achievable, though “just barely.” (Strangely enough, Hansen does not address the question of an appropriate CO2-equivalent concentration—that is, a measurement of atmospheric concentrations that includes greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide, such as methane, etc.; a CO2-e target of 350 ppm would call for a carbon-dioxide concentration of much lower than 350.) Central to the project of realizing a peak in global carbon emissions and a concomitant return to 350 ppm is the phasing-out of coal emissions as rapidly as possible, says Hansen: slowing down the rate of such emissions, in his view, does no good; all such emissions must end by 2020 in the ‘developed’ world. Hansen tells us that most of the world’s remaining supply of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas, as well as tar sands and shale oil—must be kept in the ground if future generations are to have a “livable planet.” He sees oil and gas as having to play a role in the transitional period that must begin immediately, but emissions from coal, tar sands, and oil shale are to eliminated—which is not to say that the use of the latter sources is to be discontinued, for Hansen feels that they can be allowed to continue if adequate capture and sequestration technologies can be developed and implemented on a mass scale. He does stress the importance of energy-efficiency gains and renewable-energy sources, but he finds it “extremely irresponsible” to depend entirely on these two strategies to combat global warming; instead, he writes favorably of the prospect of a “nuclear renaissance” driven by the development of fourth-generation nuclear power plants, which he seems to find to be the only viable means by which drastically to reduce carbon emissions in the near term. Both forest preservation and reforestation, moreover, are to play a role in his favored carbon-reduction trajectory, though he warns that tree-planting cannot be taken as a substitute for—an offset of—existing carbon emissions. Though initially skeptical about the place that geo-engineering schemes should have in the struggle against climate change, Hansen does conclude that such options may become necessary if business-as-usual is continued for the foreseeable future, and as such he suggests that research be made into exploring such schemes. Furthermore, he eschews the hegemonically favored cap-and-trade approach for what is referred to as “fee-and-dividend,” a framework whereby fees are collected at the mine or port of entry of a given fossil fuel and then divided equally among legal adult residents of the public, the idea being that those who outstrip their share of carbon-emissions—in most cases, Hansen assures us, economically wealthier individuals—will be financially penalized and hence face incentives to reduce their carbon footprints. Hansen envisions these fees as rising over time, so as to allow households and individuals to adjust their lifestyles accordingly; to prevent more carbon-intensive production from simply shifting their operations to a location where such regulatory frameworks are non-existent, he also insists that the fee-and-dividend approach be globalized.

His questionable views on nuclear power aside, much of what Hansen proposes in Storms of My Grandchildren seems reasonable, and as such certainly can be considered useful for informing action aimed at working to mitigate some of the more catastrophic life-negating realities that the prospect of climate change promises, however foreign many of his recommendations seem to be to the approaches favored by those currently negotiating in Copenhagen. Much of Hansen’s commentary on matters not directly related to his programmatic vision for the necessarily urgent reduction in carbon emissions, though, is both frustrating and misleading, and as such merits discussion and refutation. To begin with, Hansen discloses that he is, within the spectrum of mainstream U.S. politics, a “registered Independent” who has cast votes in the past for both Democrats and Republicans. He tells us that he supported the Gore-Lieberman presidential campaign in 2000 (adding unnecessarily that he contributed a thousand dollars to the campaign), felt “enthusiasm” at one point for the candidacy of John McCain in 2008, and experienced “moist eyes” during Obama’s Election-Day speech in November of that year. Despite his disappointment in the remarkable lack of action on climate change that Obama has thus far taken, Hansen still maintains that the current U.S. president is “still our best hope.” Moreover, Hansen claims rather bizarrely that he feels the “captains of industry” have to be a “big part of the global warming solution”; he claims that the realization of his carbon-reduction vision “require[s] their leadership.” He also writes elsewhere that he finds the U.S. Constitution to be “remarkable,” and he claims it to have been designed with an eye to preventing the “subversion of the democratic principle for the sake of the powerful few.”

That a document written in large part by slaveholders who decided to count some 700,000 enslaved former Africans as three-fifths of a human being—or, indeed, that allowed for the continued existence of formal slavery in the first place—can be considered remarkable is astounding, as is the faith Hansen seems to have in the U.S. oligarchy. Expressing enthusiasm for the prospect of a McCain presidency is clearly a horrifying position; little more need be said on that. Hansen’s final take on the newest occupant of the White House, though, is similarly of marginal value: claiming that Obama—who, to briefly review, has overseen the transfer of trillions of dollars to the very financial institutions that precipitated the current economic downturn, entirely jettisoned hope for transition to a single-payer health-insurance program in the U.S., requested a ‘defense’ budget larger than that of Bush, backpedaled on curbing Israel’s ongoing colonization of the West Bank, moved toward normalizing relations with the very leadership that has overseen genocide in Darfur, escalated war in Afghanistan, and endorsed the Congress’s pathetic proposals to reduce carbon emissions by around 4 percent by 2020 relative to 1990 levels—is “still our best hope” is entirely unjustified and obfuscatory in the extreme.

Indeed, Hansen’s fairly uncritical view of the representatives of the present system is reflected in a lack of expressed criticality toward the totality of that very system. There is in Storms of My Grandchildren no critique of the environmentally destructive consequences of consumerism, as stressed in Hervé Kempf’s How the Rich are Destroying the Earth; ⁵ of economic growth, which James Gustave Speth denounces in his The Bridge at the End of the World;⁶ or of capitalism and its myriad manifestations, all of which various Marxist and anarchist critics have long sought to abolish. It is probable that Hansen, who fashions himself an “objective scientist” who should refrain from disclosing “personal opinions,” feels that explicitly making such conclusions may prove to alienate his intended audience—the U.S. public—or, perhaps, affect book-sales or even result in his being publicly discredited and his concerns for the climate dismissed. It may also be the case that Hansen himself does not share these critical views on the present state of affairs; he did, after all, see grounds for enthusiasm in the presidential candidacy of John McCain. It should be said, though, that Hansen may well be doing a disservice to his readers in not making linkages between the profundity of the climate predicament and the necessity for a radical politics: the clear responsibility that capitalism and the State bear for the specter of climate catastrophe should be taken as representing the very limits of their continued existence, not as grounds to re-affirm such. Not to find currently prevailing power relations illegitimate in the extreme is simply absurd, and to see in the madness propagated by presently constituted power “our best hope” is in the view of the present author to consign the future of life on Earth to what Hansen calls “the Venus syndrome”: runaway catastrophic climate change that violently transitions the Earth’s climate to one similar to that of Venus, where life simply cannot exist.

Perhaps one of the most problematic aspects of Storms of My Grandchildren is the selective concern expressed in the text by Hansen for the victims of climate change, both actual and potential, present and future. The main subject of Hansen’s concern seems to be the recently born eponymous kin of his, whose pictures we find in several of the work’s chapters. Fear for the possible future that the children of his own children will likely have to face because of dangerous anthropogenic interference with global climatic processes is entirely legitimate, but it seems deeply limiting and even reactionary to find in the prospect of climate catastrophe grounds for concern only or primarily for one’s family members, who in Hansen’s case happen to be white Americans. To his credit, it is true that Hansen recognizes that millions of non-human species are similarly threatened by global warming, but one strives in vain to find in his argument a serious acknowledgment of the profoundly unjust effects climate change stands to have on human society in geographical and socio-economic terms. There is no mention in Hansen’s book, for example, of the Global Humanitarian Forum’s May 2009 report that estimated that some 300,000 humans, living almost entirely in less materially wealthy Southern societies, are being killed annually in the present day as a result of the 0.7-0.8° C increase in average global temperatures that has already occurred because of past emissions,⁷ nor is any concern other than vague generalities expressed for the plight of the billions of presently impoverished, oppressed peoples whose very continued existence is problematized by climate change. Significantly, Hansen does not endorse or even consider the concept of ecological debt,⁸ a framework whereby ‘advanced’ industrial-capitalist societies are to engage in massive redistribution schemes to the ‘developing’ world due to their historical and contemporary appropriation of far more than their legitimate share to the world’s commons, especially the atmosphere. These omissions may again speak to his worries regarding public support in the U.S., where racism and imperialism unfortunately seem to hold hegemonic positions, but they should serve as reminders that one’s obligations with regard to climate change should be general rather than particular, that what Emmanuel Levinas refers to as responsibility for the Other should be limited to nothing less than life itself—Eros, in Herbert Marcuse’s formulation.⁹

This review of Storms of My Grandchildren should not be taken as dismissive of Hansen’s contributions in the book as a whole: while it seems clear that Hansen should not have the last word on the present crisis, there is certainly much of value to be found in Storms. Many of Hansen’s practical recommendations for stepping away from the climatic abyss surely merit attention and implementation, as do some of the perspectives advanced in the fictional future-historical account with which he closes the work’s final chapter: Hansen there has one of his characters, a member of a human-like species that developed on a distant planet called Claron, dismiss humans as “primitive,” given the “irrationality in their politics,” the “dividing lines they draw on maps,” their “abuse of animals,” “the fighting” they engage in, and “the starving people” they ignore. Against the life-negating realities that he correctly criticizes as having long plagued the human condition, Hansen offers the beautiful possibility that Earth be made “an intergenerational commons,” a world which would make available its “fruits and benefits” to “every member of every generation.”

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1 David Adam, “Leading climate scientist: ‘democratic process isn’t working,’” The Guardian, 18 March 2009

2 Elizabeth Kolbert, “James Hansen Arrested,” The New Yorker, 24 June 2009

3Robin McKie, “President Obama ‘has four years to save Earth,’” The Observer, 18 January 2009

4 Suzanne Goldenberg, “Copenhagen climate summit must fail, says top scientist,” The Guardian, 2 December 2009

5 White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2008

6 New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009

7 John Vidal, “Global warming causes 300,000 deaths a year, says Kofi Annan thinktank,” The Guardian, 29 May 2009

8 Andrew Simms, Ecological Debt: Global Warming & the Wealth of Nations (London: Pluto, 2009)

9Emmanuel Levinas, Totality & Infinity (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1969); Herbert Marcuse, Eros & Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).

Castro: for the total abolition of war

Moving comments made on 15 October by Fidel Castro regarding the prospect of war between the U.S./Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran and its likely descent into nuclear conflict.  Castro’s alarm as evinced here could surely also be applied to reflection on the prospect of climate catastrophe, among other things.

Fidel Castro’s desperate take on the specter of barbarism and alternatives to such

Former Cuban president Fidel Castro’s 43-minute speech to Cuba’s university students, given in Havana on 3 September of this year.  His first public speech since having undergone surgery in 2006, his comments here address the thoroughly alarming possibility of war against Iran as well as the present climate catastrophe.  Desperate in its analysis but revolutionary in its conclusions, Castro’s speech is in this sense reminiscent of Noam Chomsky’s 12 June 2009 speech at the Riverside Church in New York City.

Apologies to those who do not understand Castilian.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilW1AF3EzTg&feature=related

2010: barbaric catastrophe

Tents for those displaced by flooding in Sukkur, Pakistan (@ The Guardian)

“The concept of progress is to be grounded in the idea of catastrophe.  That things just go on is the catastrophe” (Walter Benjamin).

In recent weeks, unprecedented deluges have provoked mass-flooding that has proven catastrophic for the peoples of Pakistan and Niger. In the former country, as of 30 August, an unimaginably severe monsoon season has set in motion floods that have displaced some 20 million people, destroyed 1.2 million homes, killed 1,600 people, and injured over 2,300.¹ A few days earlier, a reported published on the World Socialist Web Site claimed flooding in Pakistan to have submerged about 30 percent of the state’s cultivated farmland, wrecking some 17 million such acres.² Among the millions displaced by inundation, an estimated 8 percent have access to clean water.³ An estimated 70,000 children in Pakistan are at threat of dying from severe acute malnutrition in the coming weeks.⁴ In Niger, torrential rains in August wiped out grand swathes of the domestic road system, causing the River Niger to reach its highest level for 80 years⁵—this comes months after the announcement that around 7 million people in Niger and 2 million in Chad were at risk of starvation as crops failed en masse following a second year of failed rains, as examined on these pages in late June. An estimated 400,000 children were pronounced in June as being at risk of death by starvation; it is unknown how many have in fact perished since then. As of late August, approximately $800 million had been raised internationally for flood relief in Pakistan⁶—this against the total of $43 billion Pakistan’s High Commissioner recently claimed could well be necessary for the reconstruction of Pakistan.⁷ The present author is unaware of any serious effort to raise funds for starving Nigeriens.

Financially speaking, the relief effort in Pakistan is being led by the U.S., which last week offered a pathetic $200 million for relief, up from a previous $150-million pledge: this amounts to 0.03 percent of the total budget requested by U.S. President Obama for ‘defense’ this year.⁸ The $200 million contrasts rather starkly with the more than $40 billion made available by the U.S. Congress this July to finance U.S. military operations in Afghanistan,⁹ or the countless billions currently being spent on the development of such weapons-systems as the X-37B or the Conventional Prompt Global Strike system.¹⁰ This $200 million has been supplemented by the even more absurd $5 million proferred by Pakistan’s south-eastern neighbor and sometimes-enemy, India. It is said that accepting even this paltry sum created controversy among the Pakistani ruling class.¹¹ Clearly, Indian society—like U.S. society, or world society—could be aiding the peoples of Pakistan in dramatically more substantial ways; ideology—nationalism—blocks this possibility. History and physical realities, of course, also play their part: principally, the distressingly violent partition of the former British colony in South Asia into two states in 1947 as well as the various wars prosecuted by the rulers of the two countries born through this partition. It was widely feared that the most recent shooting-war engaged in by India and Pakistan (1999) would at some point involve the use of nuclear weapons. Horrifyingly enough, this possibility seems rather not to be an implausible eventuality within the near term.

Recent memory has also seen catastrophic fires grip much of central Russia; 15,000 people are said to have lost their lives because of them.¹² The fires have conflagrated so much of the grain-crop produced in Russia—a third of cultivable land in the country has been reported as destroyed—that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would no longer be exporting grain until at least December¹³—assuming, rather in bourgeois-optimistic terms, that next year’s grain-crop will not be subject to similar or even more severe fires. In similar terms, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari reportedly claims it feasible that Pakistan can be rebuilt within three years’ time, though consideration of the present climatic situation in South Asia—dramatically receding glaciers in the Tibetan plateau¹⁴ and reduced levels of snow at high elevations¹⁵ coupled with changing precipitation patterns and more extreme weather-events—suggests highly-destructive flooding-events will be increasingly common events; their intensity, indeed, can be expected to increase violently as humanity descends falls into the climate inferno.

It should be mentioned furthermore that the cut-off in Russian grain exports has brought about rather serious human suffering in those societies that normally import Russian grain, as should be expected. A 19 August Guardian piece notes that the societies that have placed at “extreme risk” because of the effects of fires in Russia and flooding in Pakistan have been Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Eritrea, Sudan, and Ethiopia.¹⁶

In addition, an island made of ice nearly 100 miles square broke off Greenland’s Petermann Glacier a month ago. The calving of this island, 600 feet thick, constitutes the most-significant such event in Greenland since 1962, with the Petermann Glacier having produced ice islands ranging from 10 to 34 square miles in size—in 2008 and 2001, respectively—during the past decade.¹⁷ This development came just days before a panel of climatologists announced to the U.S. House of Representatives that a global average-temperature increase of 2°C would cause the entirety of the Greenland ice sheet to disappear, and hence for sea levels to rise at least 7 meters.¹⁸ A global-average temperature increase of 2°C, of course, represents the “safe limit” for which most hegemonic global institutions are presently committed to achieving—if, that is, they are aiming at all, as the criminal U.S. government decidedly is not, given the Senate’s tabling of climate legislation this July.¹⁹

All of these happenings, distressing and alarming as they are, follow from physical reality—specifically, from the unprecedented temperatures experienced on planet Earth that in turn stem from the workings of global capitalist society. The year 2010 has been declared as constituting the hottest year for Earth since global-temperature records have been kept (over a century).²⁰ Whether these unprecedented temperatures find their basis in the currently-ongoing El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climatic phenomenon or in anthropogenic climate change—or a combination of the two, as seems most likely—matters less when the catastrophes such chaos induces represent future-images of the world toward which climate catastrophe is driving humanity and life itself. More severe deluges, as seen presently in Pakistan, follow from increased average global temperatures, for warmer air holds greater amounts of water vapor than does cooler air.²¹ Naturally, dispossession is brutally advanced by life-negating climatic developments, as evidenced inter alia in Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts, in which is examined the world-historical famines experienced in South Asia, East Africa, and East Asia when ENSO conditions synergized with the onset in such regions of capitalist imperialism to produce conditions that killed some 60 million people.²² It is worth noting, furthermore, that the negating climatic effects presently seen are occurring in a world that has experienced just 0.8°C of increase in average global temperatures. Some 5°C of additional warming were found by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) to be plausibly achievable by the end of the twenty-first century—though warming on such a scale is surely the IPCC’s worst-case scenario. According to studies released last November by scientists with the Global Carbon Report, humanity is at present on course for such catastrophic changes;²³ an April 2009 report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found there to be a 90 percent chance that the average-global temperature increase to be expected this century be between 3.5° and 7.4° C.²⁴

The need for the association of social forces termed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri the multitude²⁵—a “global self-conscious subject,” in Adorno’s words²⁶—to intervene radically in the present catastrophe toward affording humanity and life itself a chance is perhaps greater now than at other point in human history.

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1 “Pakistan floods in numbers,” Al-Jazeera English, 30 August 2010

2Ali Ismail, “Pakistan floods unleash desperate economic crisis,” World Socialist Web Site, 26 August 2010

3Ibid

4Ali Ismail, “Pakistan floods exacerbate child hunger and malnutrition,” World Socialist Web Site, 2 September 2010

5Trevor Johnson, “Worst famine and flooding in Niger’s history,” World Socialist Web Site, 1 September 2010

6“Pledges to Pakistan top $800m,” Al-Jazeera English, 23 August 2010

7Ismail, op. cit. (26 August)

8“Obama seeks 663.7 bln for 2010 defense spending,” AFP

9Pat Martin, “Congress ratifies Obama escalation of Afghanistan war,” World Socialist Web Site, 28 July 2010

10Bill Van Auken, “Obama administration spending billions on new global strike weapons,” World Socialist Web Site, 24 April 2010

11“Pakistan’s floods, partition, and imperialist oppression,” World Socialist Web Site, 30 August 2010

12Johann Hari, “How much proof do the global warming deniers need?” The Independent, 27 August 2010

13Tom Parfitt, “Vladimir Putin bans grain exports as drought and wildfires ravage crops,” The Guardian, 5 August 2010

14James Hansen, “Survival of Tibetan Glaciers,” NASA Goddard Institute, December 2009

15Julian Hunt, “Pakistan’s lesson on global warming,” Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 2010

16Katie Allen, “Afghanistan and African nations at greatest risk from world food shortages,” The Guardian, 19 August 2010

17Damien Pearse, “Biggest ice island for 48 years breaks off Greenland glacier,” The Guardian, 7 August 2010

18Suzanne Goldenberg, “Greenland ice sheet faces ‘tipping point in 10 years,’” The Guardian, 10 August 2010

19Haroon Siddique, “US Senate drops bill to cap carbon emissions,” The Guardian, 23 July 2010

20Juliette Jowit, “Global warming pushes 2010 temperatures to record highs,” The Guardian, 28 July 2010

21Bill McKibben, “Why has extreme weather failed to heat up climate debate?” The Guardian, 18 August 2010

22 (London: Verso, 2002), p 7

23Steve Connor and Michael McCarthy, “World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists,” The Independent, 18 November 2009

24 David Chandler, “Climate change odds much worse than thought,” MIT News Office, 19 May 2009

25Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001) and Multitude (London: Penguin, 2005)

26“Progress,” In Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Eric Krakauer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 85

Anders on Hiroshima, and survival

An excerpt from German critical theorist Günther Anders’ “One World or No World,” written in 1970 as a contribution to Hiroshima In Memoriam and Today: A testament of peace for the world.¹

“When we speak of the new epoch in which we live since the catastrophe of Hiroshima, we do not pronounce only a historical statement, but a moral statement as well.  As of August 6, 1945, mankind [sic] has shown that it is able to destroy itself, and an entirely new moral situation has arisen.  It is a situation in which each and every people in the world bears responsibility for the continuous existence of itself and of the other peoples.  Through the common danger something has been attained which, unfortunately, love has never succeeded in attaining:  for the first time the world has actually become one world.  The feeling that we are living in one world and that everybody is responsible for the lives of the others, this feeling must prevail today.  If it does not prevail every day, then we—and I mean by ‘we’ mankind as a whole—then we can abandon all hope.  Then the new epoch will be the last epoch.  For after it there will be no new epoch but sheer nothingness, a rotating globe without any life on it.”

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1Ed. Hitoshi Takayama (Asheville, North Carolina: Biltmore Press, 1971).

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fallujah: against uranium-induced mutilation—against barbarism

6 August marks the day nuclear weapons were first employed on a mass scale against human populations—this against the city-center of Hiroshima on the Honshu island of the country of Japan in 1945. The explosion of “Little Boy”—the weapon dropped from the U.S. bomber Enola Gay shortly after 8am on 6 August—in the atmosphere just above Hiroshima was immediately responsible for the murder of some 200,000 people, while the longer-term radiation-related deaths (also murders) amount to some 70,000. Upon hearing of the news that the nuclear attack on Hiroshima had been successful, U.S. president Harry Truman reportedly declared the following: “This is the greatest thing in history.” Three days after this world-historical event—an event directed against the residents of Hiroshima, and against humanity—Truman decided to go forward with the atomic-bombing of yet another populated city center—that of Nagasaki, where approximately 80,000 were killed instantaneously, with another 40,000 succumbing to conditions induced by radiation in subsequent years. No one has ever been held responsible for these monstrous crimes; the racism that legitimates such action surely lived on after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as can be seen by reflecting on the assaults visited since August 1945 on Vietnam, Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Chechnya, Gaza, and Iraq, among other sites subject to fascist destruction.

Fortunately enough, not all of these targeted societies have been subjected to the use of nuclear weapons, however horrifying have been the mass-chemical attacks against the Vietnamese and the Kurds and the employment of ‘high-tech’ experimental weapons against Gazan Palestinians—D.I.M.E., fletchette shells, etc. The people of Iraq, however, have been victimized by nuclear attack; nuclear weapons have in fact been employed against them. It should of course be clear precisely who it is that has carried out such this monstrous affront: the U.S. military, the same actor that first employed nuclear weapons against humans 65 years ago. The present nuclear attack against Iraqis has not been prosecuted exactly by the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the exponentially more destructive thermonuclear arms: instead, Iraq has been subjected to the mass-employment of the nuclear waste known as depleted uranium (DU) in munitions expended by the U.S. military in Iraq. Apparently, rounds containing DU pierce armor more readily than do rounds made from alternative materials; Barry Sanders writes¹ that, since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, restrictions limiting the use of DU rounds in and near populated centers have been lifted, in contradistinction to practice during the 1990-1991 First Gulf War (as terrible as the ‘strategic air campaign’ turned out for Iraqis). Sanders cites reports that estimate that between 100 and 200 tons of DU were used in 2003 alone, and he claims “a good portion” of Iraq’s surface area to be directly “covered” with a “fine film” of DU following its mass-usage by the Coalition of the Willing since 2003.² In situ exposure to DU is merely one aspect of the problem, given that it seems to be able to be distributed over farther distances via dust particles.

Given the nature of physics and chemistry, it should be unsurprising that significant adverse human-health impacts have been associated with exposure to DU (for DU is a product of uranium-enrichment processes). A 2004 report headed by Dr. Ahmad Hardan predicted that DU-exposure among Iraqis would result in significantly higher rates of infertility, miscarriages, fetal deformation, and such congenital conditions as hydrocephaly and anacephaly.³ Sadly enough, such predictions seem to have been accurate: a letter written jointly by Iraqi and British doctors in October 2009 regarding the situation in Fallujah—a Sunni-majority city that was subject to attack by the U.S. military in April and November 2004 found by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson to have been far graver than the Nazi bombing of Guérnica in 1937⁴—warned that young women there “are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous cancers and leukemias […].”⁵ A report released by physicians Chris Busby, Malak Hamdan, and Entesar Ariabi in July 2010—“Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009”—explores these epidemiological problems in systematic fashion.  The study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health,⁶ examines the alarmingly high cancer and infant-mortality rates seen among the city’s populace since the 2004 U.S. assault. Infant mortality rates in Fallujah (2006-2010) amount to 80 per 1,000 births (for comparative purposes, this rate is about 20 per 1,000 in Egypt, 17 per 1,000 in Jordan, and 10 per 1,000 in Kuwait), and soar to 136 per 1,000 during the year 2009-2010. Observed cancer rates (‘reported’) in Fallujah are significantly higher than those seen in Egypt and neighboring Jordan (‘expected’): cancer rates among young Fallujah residents aged 0-14 is over 12 times higher than comparable rates in these two countries, while leukemia rates among those aged 0-35 is nearly 40 times the expected rate. Brain tumors for all ages are found to be over 7 times the expected rate; breast cancer among females aged 0-44 is nearly 10 times the expected; lymphoma among those aged 0-35 are over 9 times expected rates; all malignancies for all age-groups are found to be 4 times higher than expected rates. As entirely horrifying as such results are, they are perhaps dwarfed by what may well be the report’s most disturbing revelation: among those Fallujah residents aged 0-4—that is, among those born between 2006 and 2010—only 860 males were born to 1000 females, an 18 percent reduction from the expected value of 1,055 males so born. The study’s authors find this “[p]erturbation of the sex ratio” to be “a well known consequence of exposure of mutagenic stress”; it results “from the sensitivity of the male sex chromosome complement to damage,” damage that is advanced by “ionising radiation at low doses and specifically exposure to Uranium.”

It should be remembered that DU, being radioactive, has a half-life of between 4.5 and 4.7 billion years.

It should also be noted that the U.S. Military denies that DU exposure is linked to the various significantly adverse health consequences experienced by those subject to the use of these nuclear weapons. That it then allocates no resources to attempting to ‘clean up’ expended DU—however it is that such a project could be carried out, if in fact it is the case that it could—or to compensating its victims is unsurprising, the limitless horror of such notwithstanding.⁷ Such utter disregard for human life—Iraqi life in particular—would of course be nothing extraordinary for the U.S., which established and enforced a brutal sanctions regime that killed millions and were rightly described by successive UN administrators as genocidal.⁸ Such absurd behavior of course has its parallels in the 1984 Bhopal catastrophe, as in dominant treatment of the specter of catastrophic climate change.

Given the highly negative health consequences associated with DU usage, it can be said that its mass-use by the U.S. military in Iraq amounts to what Sanders terms the “willful eradication of the future of a civilization”⁹; in Mark Gaffney’s estimation, it represents “the ultimate atrocity,”¹⁰ for the effects detailed in “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009” will for all intents and purposes likely persist for the entire remainder of human history—and far beyond that, if present threats to human survival are not soon resolved.

The findings shared in Busby et al’s study surely necessitates the prosecution and punishment of those responsible for the suffering experienced by Iraqis, whether they be held to account by means of an official international tribunal or through extra-legal processes—thoughi it must also be recognized that such is of little benefit to those born with life-threatening cancers brought about by the U.S. military. The acute deprivations visited on the people of Fallujah, as on Iraqis generally, calls for such mass-debasement never again to be be permitted or reiterated—the age-old ‘never again.’ Given extant global power relations, however—in addition to the marked absence of a “global self-conscious subject”¹¹ that could effectively oppose such—it is likely that such crimes will in fact be repeated in the future, perhaps in even more brutal fashion than to date practiced by the U.S.

The monstrous barbarism visited on Iraqis moreover shows up the utter depravity of the current U.S. administration—if any further evidence for such were needed—given its refusal to prosecute the members and supporters of the preceding administration; this barbarism also indicts the enterprise of the U.S. military, in addition to the totality of social relations which lend their support to such absolute horrors by ignoring and rationalizing them. No justification exists for the fascism visited by the United States upon Fallujah in particular or Iraq in general; none can. That these historical negations were carried out largely to effect control over hydrocarbon resources¹²—the very same materials whose contemporary mass-combustion threatens to provoke catastrophic changes in the Earth’s climate system that would render-impossible the continuation of life on much of planet Earth—points up the depth of the present predicament, and of the seemingly limitless horror of its fundament.

Knowledge of the barbarism to which the U.S. has subjected the people of Iraq, and those of Fallujah in particular, should surely be taken as a call for humanity to arise, to awaken, as “The Internationale” declares: to work to overthrow barbarism, negation, and domination. Reflection on the fate of Fallujah’s residents should represent a reminder of the imperative of working to prevent similar assaults by imperialist forces on Iraq’s eastern neighbor, however it may be that such could be effected. Herbert Marcuse will be allowed the final word:

“the revolutionary struggle demands the halting of what is happening and what has happened. Before it can give itself some sort of positive goal, this negation is the first positive act. What the human being has done to other humans and to nature must stop and stop radically—only afterwards can freedom and justice prevail.”¹³

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1The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism (Oakland, California: AK Press, 2009)

2Ibid: cf. “Depleted Uranium,” p. 83-92

3Brita May Rose, “America’s Radioactive War,” Counterpunch, 4 November 2004

4The Politics of Genocide (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), p. 37

5Tom Eley, “Cancer rate in Fallujah worse than Hiroshima,” 23 July 2010

6A copy can be read here

7“Weapons dust worries Iraqis. US Concerned,” The Hartford Courant, 6 November 2004

8Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket, 2010), p. 128-9

9Op. cit., p. 91

10“U.S. Use of Radiological Weapons Calls for an International Tribunal,” 23 August 2007

11Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Eric Krakauer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989)

12Research Unit for Political Economy, Behind the Invasion of Iraq (New York: Monthly Review, 2003); Noam Chomsky, “It’s the Oil, stupid!” 8 July 2008

13(Source unknown)

Against imperial war, nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy

The present Iranian government recently announced that it would be hosting a nuclear-disarmament conference in Tehran later this month.¹ “Iran,” the Guardian article on the question quotes the secretary for the Supreme National Security Council Saeed Jalili as saying, supports “global disarmament”; it hence “invites the world to disarm and prevent proliferation.” The summit has reportedly been entitled “Nuclear Energy for All, Nuclear Weapons for No One.” It is slated to begin on April 17 and continue for two days.

Global nuclear disarmament is undoubtedly a decidedly worthy aim. The abolition of nuclear weapons would remove one of the most serious present threats to present and future human welfare and survival, and hence could free up energy that could be directed toward the resolution of other such threats. Disarmament must not however stop at nuclear weapons; the dismantling of extant militaries and the weapons-systems that support them should surely not be excluded from such considerations.

However enthralling the promise of a disarmed and de-militarized humanity may be, it is evident that the prevailing state of affairs hardly seems to be progressing toward the direction purportedly sought by the Iranian government. The amount of money requested by U.S. President Barack Obama for the 2010 U.S. ‘defense’ budget is $527 billion—$40 billion more than that spent by Bush in the last year of his term.² Indeed, the Obama administration just yesterday released a nuclear-weapons policy that the Guardian has rather misleadingly said to amount to a “radical review”³: whereas Bush’s doctrine allowed for nuclear strikes against societies whose governments possessed chemical or biological weapons, Obama’s policy puts an end to this; under his policy-review, however, the U.S. is not to “use or threaten to use” nuclear arms against “non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.”⁴ A first-strike employing nuclear weapons against Iran, then, is not considered to be “off the table” by the current U.S. administration.

The prospect of the absolute regression that would accompany a war against Iran—what John Pilger recently referred to as the specter of a Third World War⁵—notwithstanding, it should be said that the development of nuclear-energy sites hardly seems to be a legitimate engagement, whether it take place in Iran, France, the U.S., or wherever else. Whatever the potential advantages of nuclear energy may be (for it must be admitted that there exist quite a few, particularly given the fossil-fuel based energy infrastructures that are precipitating the present climate crisis), there seems not to have to date been any reasonable proposals regarding what is to be done with the waste by-product produced by nuclear fission. Given the very serious risks such materials pose to the future of life on Earth—and in particular, the history of their being dumped on massively impoverished societies, in particular Somalia,⁶ or in the open ocean—it follows that their development and use should be discontinued as soon as possible. The same analysis goes of course for all technologies that imperil human welfare and survival—be they nuclear weapons, small arms, nuclear reactors, or mass air-transport.

1 “Iran to hold nuclear disarmament conference as new sanctions loom,” The Guardian, 4 April 2010

2 Glenn Greenwald, “The ‘defense cut’ falsehood from the Washington Post and Robert Kagan,” 3 February 2009

3 Ewen MacAskill, “Barack Obama’s radical review on nuclear weapons reverses Bush policies,” The Guardian, 6 April 2010

4 Julian Borger, “The Obama nuclear doctrine,” The Guardian, 6 April 2010

5 “Have a Nice World War, Folks,” http://www.johnpilger.com, 26 March 2010

6 Chris Milton, “Somalia’s toxic dumping ground,” The Ecologist, 1 March 2009