American Crazy i

Duped!

Delusion, denial, and the end of the American dream

Jerry Kroth, Ph.D.

ii

Book Proposal

Pre-publication reviews:

Duped! is incredible. You will want to shove it up the nose of every pompous,conservative, right wing, born again, love it or leave it jerk you have ever met.Dr. Kroth continues to approach the unapproachable. He holds no punches in

describing our American culture's blind xenophobia; telling ourselves we are thebest while betraying our most basic common sense as the evidence piles up at our

feet. We choose leaders who simply tell us what we wish we could believe, andcontinue to act in ways that shorten our lives, steal our money, and leave us less

secure than ever. In this crisp criticism of our collective confusion we see how wehave all become the chickens praising Colonel Sanders. We are simply outgunned

by short-term corporate and political profits and power from the getgo. I wishthere were more like Dr. Kroth aboard think tanks, committees, and boardroomsacross our land, but if there ever were, they are probably planted in the Nevada

desert somewhere. Enjoy the ride before your nickel runs out.

—Steve Stelle, author of On Shaky Ground

Totally eye opening, and, frankly, a very scary narrative. I never realizedhow deluded we are, and how a thick cloud of denial covers over

our public discourse. This is a necessary readfor any conscious American.

—M.S. Forrest, Ph.D., clinical psychotherapist.

Duped! iii

Jessup: "You want answers?"

Caffey: "I think I'm entitled."

Jessup: "You want answers?!"

Caffey: "I want the truth!"

Jessup: "You can't handle the truth!!"

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Table of contents

1. Illusions, delusions, and mendacity……..………….…….9

2. The myth of American democracy………….….….……21

3. A delusion colored green………………………………..39

4. Another Bob Hope Christmas ...….………….…………77

5. A delusion colored black………………………..……..113

6. Slip slidin to dystopia: ……………………………..….161

7. A personal epilogue……………………………….…...227

EndnotesAbout the Author

Book Jacket

Duped: delusion, denial, and the end of the American dream is a penetrating lookat contemporary delusions slithering across the American landscape. A delusion isa false idea about the world, a kind of intellectual trance. When an individualsuffers one, the diagnosis of mental illness is not far behind. When a nation laborsunder them, we have a state of collective mental instability. This odyssey exploresmyriad gargantuan delusions infecting the American psyche.

The first delusory trance is our intractable belief in democracy and majority rule.Myriad data points simply fail to corroborate the assertion—including the factthat half a million more people voted for Al Gore than George Bush. Over twentyseparate examples are provided to challenge the reader’s beliefs on this subject.

The average net worth of a U.S. Senator places him or her and their one hundredcolleagues in the top one percent of the country. Without Senate approval nolegislation can be passed. The U.S. far more resembles a “plutocracy” in whichthe top one percent governs the bottom ninety-nine than any democracy governedby majority rule.

Duped! 5

Global warming is the next delusory state Americans languish in with close to amajority believing, quite falsely, that the phenomenon is “grossly exaggerated,” ifnot an outright “scam,” Only thirty percent see it as a serious issue. Actual datasuggests otherwise, as C02 levels are higher than they have been in 650,000 years.The Arctic Ocean will be free of summer ice within three years, an event thathasn’t happened in 125,000 years. All the while, Glenn Beck calls it “the biggestscam ever,” and presidential contender Rick Santorum lulls America further intoits reveries by reassuring them that global warming is “patently absurd junkscience.”

Next up is the perception of ourselves as a global power. In “Another Bob HopeChristmas,” Duped! examines the delusion which counsels that when we sendtroops abroad, we are fighting for democracy, freedom, and liberty. Regrettably,facts simply don’t square well, as the legacy of wars and police actions aimed atAmerican hegemony and dominion just keep adding up. Over fifty-fivedisquieting adventures are described.

The fourth excursion rummages through the bestiary of hip-hop as a grassrootsAfrican-American phenomenon, and concludes that the misogyny and racismfound in this genre is an extremely profitable redux of racist portrayals of blackAmerican males in 1899. Contrary to ubiquitous delusions on this subject—thatthis is a black phenomena— the industry is almost exclusively white-owned,white-dominated, and white-managed. The role of black hip-hop artist as thug,pimp, vulgar, violent, and misogynistic conforms far more to the image andbehavior of an employee dutifully giving his paymaster exactly what he wantsthan any genuine expression of the angst of the American ghetto.

In the final chapter, “Slip-slidin to dystopia,” the works of Toynbee, Diamond,and others on what causes societies to collapse are reviewed. Seven major factorscontribute to the end of civilizations, and America scores high on all of them.Let’s take two. The first is a debased currency and overwhelming debt. HereAmerica s financial myths are dissected. The $1.6 quadrillion dollar derivativesmarket—that’s right, “quadrillion!”— the soaring level of personal, corporate,and national debt, added to the burgeoning trade deficit and declining dollarsuggest to many observers, including economists like Nouriel Rubini, that a“perfect storm” is headed our way in 2013.

A second causative factor is the emergence of “perverse and bizarreentertainment,” [Think Roman Coliseum]. Again, if one considers reality TV,

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where contestants are often covered with spiders or forced to eat a pig uterus forthe amusement of the audience, and then we add in trash TV, the barbarity andvulgarity of hip-hop, the exponential increase in violent video-gaming, and theproliferation of pornography—the U.S. is the largest producer of porn in theworld—this causative factor is galloping forward exponentially as well.

Indeed, all seven of the major factors of collapse are reaching their individualtipping points. Should we not awaken our delusory trance-states in time, thenightmare appears inevitable.

Chapter by chapter synopsis.

(1) Illusions, delusions, and mendacity

This chapter introduces the reader to the subject of propaganda and delusions.Using the technique of repeated affirmations, a falsehood—or a lie—is spread byas one authoritative person after another repeats it until the populace finallyassimilates it. When it does, we call the result a delusion. Only three percent ofthe American people believed Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11 amonth after it happened, but through the myriad travels of Bush, Cheney,Rumsfeld, Rice, and Wolfowitz to the tents of the American media circus, thirtypercent of the electorate started to believe it. Then fifty-five percent believed it atthe time we invaded Iraq. For Fox viewers, sixty percent believed it. Ninetypercent of American soldiers believed it. But then, to everyone’s surprise, andthree years into the war, a journalist asked Bush what Iraq had to do with 9/11,and he answered “Nothing!” The 9/11 commission and numerous other academicqueries came to the very same conclusion. To wit, propaganda creates delusions,and delusions engender a collective loss of contact with reality.

[The chapter is attached as one of two sample chapters to this proposal].

(2) The myth of American democracy

Recent polls reveal the majority of Americans feel one way, but the politicalparties purporting to represent them do not. The majority of Americans, forexample, favor the legalization of marijuana, yet neither Republican norDemocratic Party platforms stake out that position. There are twenty suchexamples provided in this chapter.

The cherished delusion that we live in a democracy governed by majority rule issquarely confronted in this chapter. Beyond the obvious issues with the electoral

Duped! 7

college appointing Bush to be president while the popular winner of the electionwas Al Gore, by half a million votes, there are myriad other data points whichlead one to believe America much more closely resembles a plutocracy. Fiftypercent of the Senate is elected by sixteen percent of the citizenry. And theaverage net worth of the U.S. Senate ($14 million per senator) places its gildeddemographics in the top one percent of the population. Since no legislation can beput into law without Senate approval, and since the 100-member Senate, inaggregate, belongs to the top one percent of American net worth, the wealthiestone percent, in fact, govern the remaining 99. This cozies up to the definition of"plutocracy" quite snugly.

(3) A delusion colored green

Sixty-nine percent of the American population currently believe that globalwarming data is suspect, and that the science may have been falsified. Thisdelusion is primarily disseminated by conservative and/or libertarian mediapersonalities. The piece examines the data in depth —also attached as a samplechapter in this proposal—with the conclusion that the problem is far moreapocalyptic than believed while the majority of the public languishes in denial.Radical and revolutionary recommendations are reviewed. Changes required inour lifestyle are enormous, and if global C02 emissions are not reversed in thenext three years, long-term irreversible climatological tragedy will be greeting us.

(4) Another Bob Hope Christmas

As Bob Hope went off to entertain troops every Christmas, this chapter asks whywe were fighting on someone else’s turf almost every year since World War II.From Korea to Vietnam, from our police actions in Panama to the Gulf War underGeneral Schwarzkopf, the United States sent troops abroad killing over fivemillion people since the end of World War II. The delusion suffered by theAmerican people is that we have been doing these things, because we arecommitted to democracy and freedom. The coarse truth is that we have beenengaged is dominion, hegemony, and empire building on a scale rivaling anyprevious empire from Genghis Khan to the Ottomans.

(5) A delusion colored black

Early films and racist publications at the beginning of the twentieth centuryportrayed black males as brutish, violent, sociopathic, drug-addicted, andhypersexual. Most Americans believe the days of this overt racism are long gone,but black male stereotypy returned in the genre of hip-hop, particularly since the

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passing of the telecommunications act of 1996. Prior to that, hip-hop was a protestmovement that grew out of the ghetto with an artistic and strident voice, but it onlygarnered ten percent of record sales. With the consolidation of the media in 1996,major conglomerates bought up hip-hop labels, and the genre took on a far moreviolent and depraved configuration soaring to forty percent of all record sales. AsSnoop Dogg’s lyrics opine, “Fuck you nigga! Yeah nigga, whassup? Nigga? Yeahmotherfucker!”

Sadly, most Americans still suffer the delusion that hip-hop is a black, grassrootsghetto movement, despite the fact that the top executives in the industry are almostexclusively white. The suits and A&R big cheeses that oversee the increasinglyviolent, racist, and misogynistic output of artists like 50Cent, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg,and Lil Wayne are also white. And so are the major purchasers of this effluviumwhite, teen, and tween—roughly seventy percent of the entire hip-hopmarketplace.

(6) Slip slidin to dystopia

This chapter looks at the major causes of societal collapse, and carefully examineshow the United States stacks up. Anthropologist, Jared Diamond [Guns, Germs &Steel] and Arnold Toynbee identified seven major causative agents of acivilization’s demise, and reviewing each in depth leaves the reader in a state ofjaw-dropping foreboding. The ten-fold increase in natural disasters impacting thecountry, accelerating levels of debt, the decline of the nuclear and two-parentfamily, the growth of bizarre entertainments, from hip-hop to violent videogaming, plus higher and higher levels of crime and sociopathy—the U.S. hasmore prisoners per capita than any country in the world— indeed all seven ofthese factors are exponentially accelerating toward their tipping points and, inaggregate, are nothing short of frightening.

In this chapter rational solutions, albeit deeply revolutionary ones, are proposed:to reduce the national debt, reverse the trade deficit, deal with climate change,pass aggressive child endangerment legislation, and reign in military spending byslashing its budget by more than half, and shuttering all the Pentagon’s 234 golfcourses.

When one reviews the political forces, which would come out of the woodwork toblunt any and all of these recommendations, however, the reader must confrontthe inevitable result that delusion and denial will win out in any showdown withreason.

Duped! 9

Duped! is roughly 70,000 words, contains ninety photos and graphics, is referencedwith seven hundred footnotes, and written for an adult trade, not a scholarly, audience.

About the author

Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor Emeritus in the graduate counselingpsychology program at Santa Clara University in California. His academicassignments have included courses in psychotherapy and personality theory,dreamwork, and research methods. Dr. Kroth hasan abiding therapeutic interest in working withdreams, personal oracles, and the applications ofdream theory to psychohistory and collectivepsychology. Jerry has been a member of theInternational Psychohistorical Association since1983.

Dr. Kroth’s twelve prior books were in the areas of counseling psychology, childsexual abuse, learning disorders, metapsychology, transpersonal psychology, andresearch methodology. In addition he has written and presented over seventy-fivepapers on anxiety, child development, mass psychology, synchronicity,experimental studies of the dream process, the psychology of propaganda andcollective psychology. Professor Kroth lives in California with his wife and twodaughters. He maintains a website: collectivepsych.com

His most recent books are listed below:

Conspiracy in Camelot: the complete history of the assassination of JohnFitzgerald Kennedy (Algora)

Psyche’s Exile: an empirical odyssey in search of the soul. (Libre Digital)

The Lindbergh kidnapping: mobs, mass psychology, and myth. (Genotype)

Aliens and Man: a synopsis of facts and beliefs. (Algora)

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Omens and Oracles: collective psychology in the nuclear age. (Greenwood Press)

Psychology Underground (Genotype)

Two sample chapters. . .

Duped! 11

1.

Illusions, delusions, and mendacity

O, what a tangled web we weave;When first we practice to deceive!

—Sir Walter Scott

A few years ago Princeton philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt published a bookentitled Bullshit.1 It was an exposition on different types of lying. There are myriadvariations. There is the bald-faced lie, of which most of us are familiar. There are liesby omission—somewhat more subtle—and then there are lies that get assimilated andinternalized and come out as illusions or delusions.

A delusion, for example, is a false idea about the world. It often comes from havingdigested propaganda—or lies— about how the world operates. Mass mediadisseminates it, allows it to echo from one corner of our nation to the other, but it startsinitially as a lie and propagates from there until it is assimilated. When the falsehood isfinally ensconced in our psyche, a delusion is born.

An illusion, on the other hand, is a misperception that frequently arises from lies byomission. For example we see the world through “rose colored glasses,” an illusiononly because we have not been talking about the proverbial elephant in the room.

These varieties of mendacity distort and warp our world. Gradually we lose contactwith reality. We live in a dream. We walk around in a trance and remain unaware of it.It happens to us individually, and it happens collectively to a nation. Let’s try a fewexamples:

Mohammed Atta and the bald-faced lie

After 9/11, the majority of Americans supported going to waragainst Afghanistan—would you believe more than 90 percent?Furthermore, the rest of the world was highly sympathetic, anda majority of European countries were ready to send troops tofight alongside us—would you believe more than 90 percent!2

Then George Bush played bait-and-switch and started tellingyarns about Iraq.

The effect of propaganda and mendacity should not beunderestimated. Right after 9/11, only three percent of Mohammed Atta, 9/11

hijacker from Saudi Arabia

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Americans thought Iraq was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center.3 As wemoved into 2003, three months before we actually bombed Baghdad, that figure grewto a hefty 30 percent. As the propaganda mounted—thanks to Fox News, Hannity,O’Reilly, Limbaugh, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Savage, and ablistering cadre of cohorts, the figure reached a storied 55 percent.4

This was all followed by the incredibly uncritical, if not obsequious, media coverage ofColin Powell’s fiery speech at the U.N. (Feb, 2003), an event he now considers themost regrettable incident of his political career. Here he laid out a PowerPointpresentation to convince the world that Iraq was in league with Al-Qaeda anddeveloping nuclear weapons. The speech aroused anti-Iraq sentiments already stirred upby the press.

As we neared the end of 2003, and already well into the war, a CNN poll showed 70percent of the American people believed Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. 5

He wasn’t. That was our delusion talking.

How did Bush connect Iraq to Al-Qaeda? It wasn’t easy.

What we know now, of course, is that Iraq was suspicious of Al-Qaeda and vice versa.Bin-Laden was a religious fellow and did not take to the secularism of SaddamHussein. Hussein had a similar antipathy for bin-Laden. They were not brothers, notallies, and really not connected in any way, according to the 9/11 Commission andmany other studies on the subject.6

So how did Bush pull it off?

Bush had to establish a linkage between the national trauma of 9/11 and his ambitionsin Iraq. He did this, in part, by frightening Americans into believing Hussein hadpoisons, possible nuclear weapons, anthrax, and biological horrors that he could simply“give” to terrorists like bin-Laden.

But Bush still needed to pull a bunny out of his hat to prove some kind of tangible linkbetween Iraq and Al-Qaeda. He did this by saying that one of the 9/11 terrorists, itsmastermind, Mohammed Atta, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague. Atta, he said, metwith Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence agent stationed in Prague, onApril 9, 2001.

There was the connection! This was his touchstone and the bedrock upon which hecould build his case for war in Iraq. From here Vice President Richard Cheney couldspin to his heart’s content, Condoleeza Rice dutifully following on talk show after talkshow underscoring the connection between the terrorists who attacked us and Iraq. Al-Qaeda-Iraq; Iraq-Al-Qaeda. Classical conditioning at its finest. Propaganda scholarscall it 'repeated affirmations,'– saying something false over and over with enoughauthoritative voices behind it, until finally it is believed.

Duped! 13

Off they trekked to the tents of the American media circus: Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice,Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush himself with a recurring theme: 7 8

• Iraq could attack us “on any given day.” That “before the day of horror cancome, before it is too late to act, this danger must be removed.” [Bush]

• “This is a man who has got connections with Al-Qaeda. Imagine a terroristnetwork with Iraq as an arsenal and as a training ground, so that a SaddamHussein could use this shadowy group of people to attack his enemy and leaveno fingerprint behind. He's a threat.” [Bush]

• “He's a threat because he is dealing with Al-Qaeda.” [Bush]

• "There clearly are contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq that can be documented.[Rice]

• Saddam Hussein “had long established ties with Al-Qaeda.” [Cheney]

• “If we’re successful in Iraq, then we will have struck a major blow right at theheart of the geographical base of the terrorists who had us under assault now formany years, but most especially on 9/11.” [Cheney]

• “And I also mentioned the fact that there is a connection between Al-Qaeda andSaddam Hussein.” [Bush]

• “With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on theUnited States. And war is what they got.” [Bush]

• “We’re taking the fight to those that attacked us.” [Bush]

• “Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regimes gives weaponsof mass destruction to a terrorist ally.” [Bush]

• “Iraq could use unmanned aerial vehicles with chemical or biological payloadsfor missions targeting the United States.” [Bush]

• “It could give these weapons to a terrorist group or individual terrorists to attackus.”9[Bush]

Bush was told ten days after September 11th that Iraq had no connection to Al-Qaeda.However, the President dispatched one emissary after another to find a linkage, whichjust didn’t exist. As David Dunford, a Middle East specialist for the State Department,said: “You could feel there was a drive to go to war no matter what the facts.”10

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The propaganda blitzkrieg evanesced from the signature piece of empirical evidencelinking Saudi-born 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, to a secret meeting in Prague withan Iraqi intelligence official on April 9, 2001, the penultimate connection between Al-Qaeda and Iraq.

Enter the bald-faced lie: “Bush lied, I died.”

The deceit here is that Mohammed Atta nevermet with the Iraqi intelligence official, and thePresident knew that.

The FBI had Mohammed Atta’s cell phonerecords. At the time he was said to be inPrague, Atta was actually in Florida makingcalls on April 6th, 9th, 10th, and 11th. On April4th he was photographed by a bank surveillancecamera in Virginia. He was in the UnitedStates! He was simply not in Prague. Never was. Story false.

The Czech police said so. The 9/11 Commission said so. The FBI knew so nine monthsbefore we invaded Iraq.11 The meeting between Atta and Iraqi intelligence simply nevertook place.12 And there were no flight records showing Atta taking off from Florida toPrague and then quickly returning to make more calls on his cell phone from Sarasota.

It is beyond the pale to think Bush did not know this, or that the FBI might haveconspired to keep knowledge about Atta’s activities in Florida and Virginia from thePresident. He had to have known it. In effect, this is a lie Bush told to the nation toincite the American people into supporting a war, that took the lives of 100,000 people.

As Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said, “We were railroaded into an unnecessary war.”13 Iraq had nothing to do with bin-Laden, with Al-Qaeda, or with 9/11 period.14

Now a bald-faced lie, particularly with repetitious propaganda echoing out of every carradio, quickly devolves into a “delusion.” A delusion, to repeat, is a false interpretationof the world. Some 90 percent of troops fighting in Iraq, when surveyed as late as 2006,said they felt that Hussein was involved in 9/11, and 43 percent of the Americancitizenry still believed that falsehood as late as 2006.15

Delusions come from conditioning, that is, repeating the lie over and over until it settlescomfortably in the living room of the national psyche. If your primary source of newswas PBS, only 9 percent fell for it. If Fox News was your primary source, 60 percentbelieved it. Overall and collectively, we can safely say that 43 percent of the Americanpublic suffered this delusion, were living inside a media-induced trance—adream—and, to that extent lost contact with reality.

Duped! 15

A few years into the war, a journalist asked President Bush pointedly what Iraq had todo with 9/11, and Bush replied in a rather testy manner “Nothing!”

Nuf said?

And a comprehensive analysis of this issue shows that Bush’s testy remark was actuallyquite true:

“The consensus of intelligence experts has been that these contactsnever led to an operational relationship, and that consensus is backedup by reports from the independent 9/11 Commission and bydeclassified Defense Department reports as well as by the SenateSelect Committee on Intelligence, whose 2006 report of Phase II ofits investigation into prewar intelligence reports concluded that therewas no evidence of ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.”16

This book is about disabusing ourselvesof our delusions, awakening from thedream, and re-connecting to reality.

Illusions and lies by omission

In order to illustrate illusions and lies byomission, we enter the offices of themarriage counselor.

A wife finds that her husband complains of overwork at his job. He gets up a night andpaces. She loves him. She is happy with him. She is joyful in her marriage, but worriesabout his new stresses. He tells her there is a person driving him nuts at work, so shechecks out a book from the library on how to deal with a toxic co-worker. She sits upat night and counsels him to think about getting another job. She even helps him draft anew resume.

He tells her he’s developed physical symptoms that make him tired and sexuallydisinterested. Off to the library she trucks to read up on Hypoactive Sexual DesireDisorder and learn how she can help the man she loves, has loved, and believesshe will always love.

She spends months in this place, stressing over his apparent ennui, and holdinghis hand all the way.

But one day she passes a restaurant and sees him with another woman, their eyesglazed over in an obviously romantic tête-à-tête. She discovers he’s been havingan affair for well over a year.

A video entitled “The Media Matrix:how propaganda and mass media areundermining America’s contact with

reality,” covers this propagandablitzkrieg in considerable detail

including clips from Bush’s astonishingpress conference. Go to

http://vimeo.com/34527725

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This is the elephant in the room, the lie of omission. It was always there, butnever mentioned, never talked about.

Perhaps she was "in denial” and should have known, should have suspected. Wedon’t know whether we can accuse her of denial, or whether he was just anexceptionally good liar. But, clearly she was living in a fantasy-land, a dream,suffering from an illusion that their married life was joyful with only a few upsand downs.

Confronting mendacity

When we confront the lies that surround us, it is a painful experience.Embarrassing, humiliating, traumatic. It is dis-illusionment in the most literalsense of the word. If you have ever been there, you know it isn’t fun. As CarlJung reminded, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”17

Our married woman, now divorced, wistfully may look back on the days whenshe was happy, naively thinking she was with the man of her dreams. She mayeven say to herself she regrets discovering him in that restaurant and losing thebliss she had in her heart.

But nine times out of ten, she’s happy she learned the truth, happy she got wiser,happy her life is no longer a fraud, and she no longer the victim of falsehood andillusions. No pain no gain.

She would never describe the process of her divorce, her realizations, and herinsights as delightful or fun.

But she wouldn’t do without them for a second!

When delusions or illusions are confronted and destroyed, there are plenty ofother emotions too. There is a shock to your sense of the world. You feelundermined. Betrayed. Your values, ideals, and the things you held close in yourheart have been shattered and unwillingly deconstructed right before your eyes.

Imagine the mother whose son went off to fight and die in Iraq writing in his lastletter to her that he was there “to kill those suckers who attacked us on September11th !”

When his body is returned to her, and learning that Iraq had nothing to do with thebombing of the World Trade Center, that her little boy was sacrificed on the altarof a lie, there is more than grief and sadness. Someone took advantage of her,exploited and used her, falsified bits and pieces of her world for their own selfishaims. Your Her little boy disappeared on the wings of a lie.

Duped! 17

Sadness, shock, outrage, and anger. Not easy,not fun.

Psychotherapists, who have logged manylong hours with these matters, teach us thatwe can expect plenty of defense, denial, andresistance along the road of reconnectingwith reality.

We don’t want to accept these truths willy-nilly. Like the jilted wife, we fight for ourillusions and delusions: “Maybe he and thatwoman were just talking business after all!”

If we aren’t married to our delusions, we are certainly highly invested in them.We try to rationalize our way out. We rebut. We deny. We critique. We don’twant it. We question the evidence. We double-check the footnotes. We can’t let itin. . .

But the truth is waiting for us in the anteroom of our own self-realization.

This book will expose you to all of the above. It is a “confrontation” in the purestsense of the word– hard to accept, harder to assimilate, and there will be muchresistance, carping, denial, rationalization, and rebuttal to accompany yourjourney.

The 700 footnotes provided at the end are there to help you check, double-check,and triple check against whatever delusions you may be reluctant to release.

This is not a feel good book. . . but it is the truth.

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Getting rid of a delusion makes us wiser than getting hold of a truth

—Ludwig Borne

Duped! 19

Most Americans believe they are informed and reasonably literate about globalwarming. Still others believe they have made personal efforts to do theirpart in addressing it. Certainly a majority of Americans do not feel that

they suffer any particular illusions or delusions on this subject.

The following chapter takes a contrary position.

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3.

A delusion colored green

As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at anypoint in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the

century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.

Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker

A 2010 Gallup poll showed that almost half of the American population feelsglobal warming is “greatly exaggerated.”18 Among Republicans, a 2011 Pew pollshows 75 percent of staunch conservatives, 63 percent of libertarians, and 55percent of Main Street Republicans say there is “no solid evidence of globalwarming.”19 More than 45 percent of the general population say the effects ofglobal warming either will never happen or will not happen in their lifetimes. In2012, 48 percent did not think the earth was warming at all,20 and 69 percent ofthe American public are now skeptical of global warming and believe scientistsmay have falsified research.21

The major media talking heads busily disseminating this propaganda are JohnStossel, George Will, Robert Samuelson, Benny Peiser, James Inhofe, MichaelCrichton, Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News, in general,and Glenn Beck in particular, who calls it the “greatest scam in history.”22 This isthe assembled cadre of rhetoricians repeating the canard that global warming iseither not to be believed, a left wing conspiracy, or a liberal hoax.

Recent research shows there has also been an objective decline in media reportingon global warming since 2007.23

Any cursory review of the evidence is entirely contrary to this prevailing viewand, in fact, overwhelming. A study in the journal Nature found that of 928 peerreviewed articles on the subject, not one took issue with human-caused globalwarming. A Gallup poll of scientists showed only 10 percent had doubts in2003.24 Compare that to 69 percent of the entranced couch-potato publicabsorbing the thrust and parry of John Stossel’s 20/20 or the astute scientificjournalism of Fox and Friends.

Duped! 21

In the first decade of the 21st century, the hottest years on record are occurring andcountless scientific bodies affirm the seriousness of global warming, including thePolish Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, the Royal Society ofthe United Kingdom, the American Chemical Society, Union of ConcernedScientists, American Insitute of Physics, European Physical Society, AmericanGeophysical Union, European Geosciences Union, and the European Federation ofGeologists . . . the list is too long to enumerate.25

The most recent poll of 1,372 scientists by the National Academy of Sciences in2011 shows 97 percent of scientists believe global warming is real and man-made.26 Only three percent harbor any lingering doubts, but, again, thanks to Americanmedia propaganda, as late as 2012 only 30 percent of Americans believed globalwarming was a “serious” problem. 27

As Richard Horwitz opines in 2011, “. . . global warming ranks near thebottom of Americans’ environmental priorities (e.g., much lower thantoxins in the air or waterways). They generally insist that the causes ofclimate change can be addressed without personal sacrifice.”28

This is a gigantic serving of delusion wrapped in a sugary pastry shell of denial.

The problem in brief

The single gravest threat we face is global warming. Eleven of the past 12 yearshave been the hottest since 1850. The hottest year on record was 2005, and thethird hottest year ever recorded was 2010.29 The phenomenon is real.

A few summers ago, France experienced an unusual heat wave, and 10,000 seniorcitizens in retirement homes, which did not have air conditioning, perished in onemonth. Later, a "thermal invasion" from the Sahara desert created a scorchingheat wave in southeast Europe with temperatures reaching as high as 111 degreesin Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Italy. In the far north, Inuit leaderSheila Watt-Cloutier said: “For the first time in history, my community has had touse air conditioners. Imagine that, air conditioners in the Arctic.”30

A consortium of scientists recently warned that by 2050, 37 percent of species onearth would become extinct primarily due to global warming.31 32 The depletion ofthe ozone layer has been accompanied by an 812 percent increase in melanoma inthe last 20 years. 33 The percentage of Earth’s surface regularly suffering droughthas more than doubled since 1970.34

Western snow packs in the United States now melt up to a month earlier than theydid a half century ago, creating a burning season that has scorched 6.5 times moreacreage than two decades ago.35 In August of 2010, 300-400 forest fires werestarting every day in Russia due to the most intensive heat wave in 130 years ofrecord keeping.36

22

A similar 2010 heat wave caused temperatures to reach 128 degrees in Pakistan.The Indus river valley flooded with two million homes damaged, a fifth of thecountry under water, and 20 million people impacted, due to unprecedentedtorrential rains.37 As Lester Brown says, “What happened to Russian and toPakistan in the summer of 2010 are examples of what lies ahead for all of us if wecontinue with business as usual . . . more crop withering heat waves, more intensedroughts, more severe floods, and more destructive storms.”38

Record highs are now twice as frequent as record lows on the planet.39 In 1910there were 150 glaciers in Montana. There are now only 27.40 Glaciers are meltingin the Andes, Rockies, Alps, the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. The giantGangotri Glacier keeps the Ganges River flowing, but it is retreating, and 407million people live in the Gangetic basin. 41

Virtually the entire population of Lima (9 million) depends on the water fromPeru’s glaciers.

Scientists believe the Arctic Ocean could be free of ice as early as the summer of2015.42 The last time that occurred was 125,000 years ago, and it is expected tohappen in just three years!43

Surface temperatures in Greenland are 4-6 degrees above average, and the meltingindex 2.5 times the annual average, an all time high.44 The Greenland ice sheetsare melting rapidly, some 200 cubic kilometers per year, and as the earth’s icesheets melt, they stop reflecting sunlight back into the atmosphere.

The poles turn darker as they absorb heat at unprecedented rates, all of ithappening so rapidly that in 2007 Arctic sea ice was at the lowest level everrecorded, 20 percent less than in 2005.”45 In Antarctica, ice loss in 2006 was 75percent greater than a decade earlier.46 If the West Antarctic ice sheet meltsentirely, sea level would rise by 16 feet.

Glacier melting in Washington State, 1959 vs. 2003.

Duped! 23

In Australia, the largest coral reef in the world has slowed its growth due to thewarmest water trend in 400 years.47 Rising ocean temperatures are causing aproliferation of the Bibrio genus of bacteria that cause food poisoning,gastroenteritis, septicemia, and cholera.48 Researcher Barbel Honisch fromColumbia asserts in Science that not only are oceans becoming warmer, but alsomore acidic, threatening coral reefs, oysters, salmon and other species. The rate ofacidification is greater than in the last 56 million years. Honish says, “We areentering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change.”49

Many lakes in Siberia have simply disappeared in a single day. As the tundra thatsupports the lake melts, the water seeps underground and the lake vanishes. Of thealmost 11,000 Siberian lakes that shrank significantly, the researchers found 125disappeared entirely and were refilled with vegetation.”50

Beyond warming

“The death of our civilization is no longer a theory oran academic possibility; it is the road we’re on.”51

–Peter Goldmark, Rockefeller Foundation

Humanity is destroying its environment in matters that go beyond global warming.Unregulated capitalism and burgeoning population are causing numerous other tippingpoints. In 2011, the population of the world reached 7 billion, having taken less than halfa century to double. The planet is increasing its population annually by 74 millionpersons, adding a new Iran or Turkey each year. Global warming is, at least in part, theresult of an increasing population chasing dwindling resources, and there are many moresymptoms of this process beyond warming itself.

For example, 80 percent of the ocean's biomass has been depleted due to industrializedfishing in the last 15 years. For every pound of shrimp sold, 20 pounds of other seacreatures are caught in nets.52 All 17 of theworld’s oceanic fisheries have been harvestedbeyond capacity, and the ocean has lost morethan 90 percent of predatory fish\[tuna,swordfish, shark, and marlin].

One of the major causes of shark depletion isthe luxury of shark fin soup in Asia. Sharks arecaught just to remove their fins and thenthrown back to die a slow and painful death.Despite the ecological crime, frozen shark finscan still be purchased in most Asian foodstores in the U.S. Open ocean sharks have fallen to onepercent of their 1950 level,53

0

2

4

6

8

10

1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

Fish catch / 100 hooks

24

Only 25,000 blue fin tuna remain on the planet.54 The average weight of an Atlanticswordfish used to be 1,000 pounds. Today it is 90. A marine biologist from theUniversity in Halifax says, “People have fished for as long as we’ve dwelled on thisplanet. Within our lifetime, it’s going to be over!”55

The major loss of fish stock depletion is from commercial fishing and bottomtrawling:56

Bottom trawling is the practice of dragging huge nets weighted downby trawl doors, chains, and rock-hopper gear. A trawl has a large bagshaped net, wide at the mouth and tapering toward an enclosed end.The net is connected to two large steel doors that can weigh up to 5tons each. These doors are designed to drag along the seafloor andkeep the nets open. On average, a commercial trawling boat can catchan average of 15 tons of fish in a single haul. The sheer size andweight of trawls allow them to capture virtually everything in theirpath, from unwanted fish and mammals to sea turtles and deep seacorals. Their gear and chains literally scrape the ocean floor and flattenanything in their path. The massive trawl doors create tracks on theocean floor as the huge engines from the boats are able to take thisoperation further and further out to sea.”57

Water depletion

Another consequence of overpopulation is the depletion of water and of fossilaquifers. Saudi Arabia tapped into its ancient aquifer and began harvesting wheat.

Satellite photo of Chinese fishing fleets destroying huge swaths of seafloor. The sediment churned up bythe giant fishing nets, called “mudtrails,” are a “highly visible sign of the disturbance to sea-bottomecosystems.” This photo was published in Nature. The U.N. Secretary General reported in 2006 that 95percent of damage to seamount ecosystems worldwide is caused by deep sea bottom trawling. While theU.N. tried to institute a moratorium, Canada, Russia, Japan, China, and South Korea opposed any move tostop it.

Duped! 25

However, because of over pumping, its three million ton wheat harvest is endingand will be entirely gone in 2012. India’s over pumped aquifers are following inSaudi Arabia’s path. Yemen’s water tables have fallen so much that tap water isavailable in its capital only once every four days, and its grain harvest declined by30 percent. The underground basin that supplies the capital city Sana’a may bedepleted in 2015.58

Indeed, half the world’s population lives where water tables are falling, includingChina, India, and the U.S.59A fifth of the U.S. grain harvest comes from irrigatedland; for India it is three-fifths; for China, four-fifths. Underground water nowmeets 75 percent of Beijing’s needs. The city currently drills down 1,000 feet toreach water, five times deeper than 20 years ago.60 The Middle East has the mostserious crisis, mainly Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.

[Note that it takes only 14 tons of water to produce a ton of steel, but 1,000 tonsof water to produce a ton of wheat.]61

Consequences

Most of these facts are already widely known, and there is no need to recite evenmore. One piece of data, however, stands out and deserves repetition. It is thesingle most ominous statistic confronting the human race.

Researchers pulling up samples of Antarctic ice cores find air bubbles inthe samples. They can determine the amount of carbon in the air as farback as 650,000 years. Their work reveals current CO2 levels in theatmosphere today are “27% higher than at any time in thelast 650,000 years.”

There were four ice ages duringthis period, and in each C02levels rose, but none as high asthe levels we are experiencingtoday. That ghastly statisticcomes from the journal Science,and it is not likelyembroidered.62 A subsequentstudy examined an ice coregoing back 800,000 years, andthe conclusion was the same. Inthose 800 millennia ofaccumulated C02concentrations, there wassimply “no analogue to thepresent time,” said Dr. EricWolff of the British Antarctic Survey.63

CO2 level last30 yrs.

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

years

650,000400,000300,000200,000100,000present

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The tundra of Siberia contains frozen methane. If the tundra continues to thaw,not only do lakes disappear, but there is a chance methane will be released intothe atmosphere, a greenhouse gas 23 times worse than C02, and that will multiplyan already oversized problem.64

If you are between 18 and 30 years of age—and you are one of the 30 percent ofAmericans who believes this problem is serious—by the time you reachretirement, the following planetary circumstances will likely greet you:

• Over a million species of plant and animal life will have gone extinct,more than one-fourth of all plant and vertebrate species.65 There will likelyno longer be tigers, pandas, rhinos, sturgeon, alligators, parrots, sharks,gorillas, tuna, elephants, blue whales, golden lions, red wolfs, snowleopards, polar bears, gazelles, or rhinos.

• In the summer there will be no ice sheets in the Arctic Ocean.

• Most coral reefs and the species they protect will be gone.

• Diseases formerly associated with equatorial climates will reach intoEurope and North America: malaria, encephalitis, ticks, and sand flies,which carry visceral leishmaniasis. These along with malaria and yellowfever are just some that are predicted.66

• Wildfires, heat waves, droughts, and extreme weather events likehurricanes and cyclones will be run-of-the-mill occurrences.

• There will be large-scale food shortages and famines.

• There will be a complete disappearance of glaciers in the Andes, a drop inagricultural production in South America of up to 50 percent, and acollapse of the Caribbeaneco-system.67

• The volume of fresh waterin the Arctic Ocean frommelting has increased 10percent, suggesting warmocean currents couldchange, possiblyconverting Europe into athermal landscape similarto Siberia.68

• Ocean levels will rise toinundate and destroy many

Lake Geneva in Switzerland battles unusually coldweather in 2012

Duped! 27

islands, archipelagos like Fiji, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, the CookIslands, portions of New Guinea, Tuvalu, the Maldives, Bangladesh, andover 150 million shoreline-dwelling humans will have been displacedinland.

• Most glaciers will have disappeared, impacting the down rivercommunities that depend on runoff for their survival.

Comments of the World Bank are of interest:

“Around the world, the deep oceans are heating, the tundra is thawing,ice shelves are breaking up, sea levels are rising, fish, insects, birds,and ecosystems are migrating, violent weather is increasing, and thetiming of the seasons has changed—all from a one degree Fahrenheittemperature increase. The scientific consensus is that temperatures willrise an additional two to 10 degrees by the end of this century. Twoyears ago, the biggest insurer in Great Britain, CGNU, said thatunchecked climate change could bankrupt the global economy by2065. Nature's message is remarkably simple: Cut carbon emissionsquickly, globally, and dramatically, or prepare for a future ofenvironmental and economic disintegration.”69

Indeed a recent peer-reviewed scientific report says that once C02 concentrationsreach a certain level—we are not quite there yet—the effects become irreversiblefor at least a thousand years, regardless of mitigation efforts.70

28

Is global warming “greatly exaggerated,” a “left-wing hoax,” and a“liberal conspiracy?” 1

Republican and Democratic remedies

The liberal-conservative dialectic provides little when addressing this problem. Forthe Republicans under George Bush, the dialogue never ventured further than theborders of denial. Scientists were co-opted for media appearances to question whetherglobal warming was due to a human footprint despite the fact the overwhelmingmajority of the scientific community said it was.71

1 Source for North Pole photos NOAA

North Pole2003

North Pole2010

• Twice as many recordhighs as record lows for

the last decade.

• Of 1,372 scientistspolled, 97 percent

believe global warmingis real and man-made.

• C02 levels have notreached this level in

650,000 years.

North Pole1979

Duped! 29

Bush, as with most his presidential endeavors, acted as a corporate puppettraveling to Canada to discuss the “opening” of the North West Passage and howgas deposits of the Arctic could be exploited due to melting polar caps. Duringtheir years of majority, Republicans offered little of substance to deal with theimpending catastrophe. Supporting the development of biofuels and ethanol, asingular Republican initiative, had no real effect on the carbon footprint of theUnited States,72 but it did raise the cost of grains worldwide, impacting thepoorest segments of society.

Indeed, under Bush, regulations were so deeply relaxed or ignored that the worstAmerican ecological disaster ever, the spill of the British Petroleum rig, DeepWater Horizon, dumped 200,000 barrels of oil per day in the Gulf of Mexico andspread this toxicity over 2,500 square miles. Bush’s Interior Secretary exemptedBP from requisite safety permits and expedited their drilling requests.

Obama did make an effort to support solar energy, but the result was a $500million loss when the subsidized company went bankrupt due to Chinesecompetition. Obama’s second major initiative, increasing car mileagerequirements through what is known as C.A.F.E., has some teeth, but is not likelyto reduce our carbon footprint significantly—perhaps a few percentage pointsannually—with some possible reductions in greenhouse gas emissions expectedby 2016.73

Beyond these initiatives, the Democratic solution to global warming hasn’tmanaged to get more than a few steps beyond bourgeois thinking. Change yourlight bulbs, car pool, purchase a hybrid, reuse, and recycle. Think globally, actlocally, a progressive mantra unfortunately—and regrettably— that simplydoesn’t work.

Here’s the rub. In Atherton, California, an upscale community of multi-milliondollar homes and an abundance of wealthy Silicon Valley types, many of whomconsider themselves “green,” their average electric bill is considerably higher thanin poorer areas of the state. In San Mateo County, where Atherton finds itself,electricity usage is higher than in Humboldt County. Humboldt is actually colderin the winter, but folks earn half what the residents of San Mateo earn and as aconsequence they use 30 percent less electricity per capita.74

Curiously, most of the residents of Atherton are actively pro-environmental andoverwhelmingly registered Democrats—70 percent. And they see themselves asconscientious in their consumption: they have stainless steel “energy-saving”refrigerators, energy-efficient freezers, energy-efficient hot tub pumps, environmentally-friendly air conditioners—three or four when you start counting—energy-saving poolpumps, plus the latest energy-efficient flat screen TVs. But despite politically correctmoral sensitivity to matters green, their electricity consumption is still 30 percent higherthan their neighbors a few miles north.

30

In Humboldt, there are fewer pool pumps, hot tubs, air conditioners, or flat screens toworry about, and the electric bill, an excellent correlate to the national carbon footprint,is significantly lower. [Note electrical generation is the largest source of carbonemissions.]

Humboldt is primarily Republican.75 Atherton, Democrat. Does it really matter?

It is not political affiliation and how “green” one professes to be, but from anempirical point of view, it is simply how rich you arethat determines how much electricity is used.

How many Americans have fallen into the arms ofthis gilded movie-star polemic and started savingaluminum cans, bought a more energy-efficientappliance, purchased a hybrid, and thought theywere “doing their part?” If we woke up from thisdream, we might see it for what it is: a petite-bourgeois delusion.

The Carnegie Institution's Department of GlobalEcology said that between 2000 and 2004,worldwide carbon dioxide emissions increased by3.1 percent a year, about three times as fast as the1.1 percent rate of increase in the 1990s.76 Globalwarming is galloping ahead at triple the rate it didwhen Clinton was president.

During American’s recession year of 2009, there was a drop of emissions of awhopping seven percent, quite encouraging, but it came back with a vengeance the nextyear. In 2010, U.S. carbon emissions increased 3.9 percent over the previous year.77 Asecond study by the Global Carbon Project reports that emissions rose 5.9 percent in2010.78 The U.N. Meteorological Organization reported that worldwide global carbondioxide emissions in 2010 jumped by the highest one year amount ever.

Since 1990, carbon emissions have increased 29 percent.79

All our efforts to conserve, recycle, reuse, or invest in a Prius are not onlyineffective, they make not a whit of statistical difference in the exponential rise ofour carbon footprint. A radical revolution is required, not comely “alterations” or“adjustments.” This is a problem that is catastrophic in scope and apocalyptic inconsequence. And it is the rich who are most responsible.

The Carnegie report continues: “The world's richest countries contributed about60 percent of total emissions in 2004 and account for 77 percent of cumulativeemissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution.”80

Deluxe energy efficient, stainlesssteel refrigerator freezer for

under $9800.00

Duped! 31

It is the Atherton dilemma we are talking about.

Greg Marlin from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory said: “We're just using moreenergy and being more consumptive . . . Putting everybody in hybrid cars isn't going tosolve this one."81

The rich exceed the poor in carbon emissions, not only between Atherton andHumboldt, but between the rich United States and poorer Mexico or Brazil. The U.S.population is three times that of Mexico, but our carbon footprint 15 times greater!Twice the population of Brazil, we exceed their carbon emissions by a factor of 17!82

So let us focus on the global solution to this issue and try to remove ourselvesfrom petite bourgeois thinking and our own media conditioning.

Major Culprits: The United States and China:

Currently, the U.S. and China are the world’s largest emitters of C02. China, itwas thought, would surpass the U.S in 2010, but they took the lead even sooner.83

In 1990, China emitted 2,300 tons of C02 and the U.S. 4,800. In 2007, it was roughlyU.S. 5,500 and China over 6,000. That is a 60 percent increase in carbon emissions byjust these two countries in less thantwo decades.

According to a reportreleased by the NetherlandsEnvironmental AssessmentAgency, China overtook theU.S. in emissions of CO2 by7.5 percent in 2006. WhileChina was 2 percent belowthe United States in 2005,voracious coal consumptionand increased cementemissions of CO2 caused thenumbers to rise rapidly, thegroup said.

China now emits more C02 than the U.S. and Canada.84

Almost 75 percent of China’s energy production and electricity comes from theburning of dirty coal in old-fashioned coal-fired facilities. In addition, anestimated 800 million of China’s 1.2 billion people use coal in their homes. Inmany rural communities, the fuel is full of arsenic, lead, mercury, fluorine, andother poisonous metals that can pose a serious health threat.85

Coal-fired power plant in China

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China currently burns more coal than the U.S., Japan, and Europe combined and itscoal burning is increasing 10 percent per year.

China and the U.S. together account for over 40 percent of the world’s carbonemissions. This was true in 2007 and it remains true in 2010.86 87

Getting real.

China increased its carbon emissions three-fold in the last 17 years. It is buildingtwo old fashioned, dirty, sooty, coal-fired power plants every week in an attemptto manufacture all the products the U.S. and Western Europe are requesting.Virtually everything you buy at Wal-Mart is made in China. Shop at Target,Longs, K-Mart, and the majority of products come from China.

In just eight years, the U.S. lost 2.4 million manufacturing jobs to Chinese imports. 88

The average wage in China is 57 to 75 cents an hour.89 No wonder the shirtmanufacturers in Alabama, or the carpet makers in Vermon, went under— or wentabroad with their factories. While some call it “globalization,” others use a much oldermoniker, “scab labor.”

China consumes half the world’s cement, and its industrial machine is heavilypolluting its own country and the world. Seventy percent of China’s major lakesand rivers are polluted. The once pristine Yangtze River is now virtually devoidof birds and visible signs of life. Chengdu and Chongquing dump billions of tonsof mostly untreated human, animal, and industrial waste directly into the river.Today, most of the acid rain in Japan and South Korea is ‘Made in China.’90

China is considered the most polluted country on the planet today.91

Curiously, despite the high levels of pollution and use of pesticides, only onepercent of Chinese food entering America is inspected.92

Companies like Dow Chemical and U.S. Steel spend about 10 times as much onenvironmental protection as do Chinese competitors such as Sinopec Oil and BaoSteel.93

China has more than 100 cities with over one million people, and virtually everyone of these teeming masses of humanity is shrouded in a toxic haze of sulfurdioxide and lung-piercing particulates. Of the 20 largest cities in the world withthe absolutely worst air pollution, 16 of these gas-masking-optional metropolisesare in China.”94

Duped! 33

As the US transfers its manufacturing to China, the Chinese in turn build coal-firedpower plants far faster than all the hybrids the American middle class might ever buy tomitigate this planetary damage.

To be clear, it is necessary to retreat tolevels that existed in the early 1990s ifwe are to make any impact on globalwarming. This is not something toconsider, ponder, or think about. It isan action statement, a clarion call, aradical departure from all ourtraditional ways of thinking.

A thought about coal

At the early stages of the industrial revolution in 1902, Londoners were burningcoal to heat their homes. The soot rose above the city with intense levels ofpollution. Dozens of novels portrayed black-faced chimney sweeps. From thesummit of St. Paul's Cathedral of Westminster Tower, the average limit ofvisibility was less than half a mile. Cries to reduce the smoke faced a toughopponent. Coal was fueling the industrial revolution. To be against coal burningwas to be against progress. "Progress" won out.

It was not until the 1950s when a four-day fog killed 4,000 Londoners that anyreal reform passed. Parliament enacted the Clean Air Act in 1956, reducing theburning of coal. It was the beginning of serious air-pollution reform in England.

The travesty that happened in England 60 years ago, is being re-enacted in Chinaevery day. Some 650,000 Chinese citizens die each year from air pollution.95

Thousands of foundries in China run on industrial-grade coke with no pollutioncontrol devices on their smokestacks, creating a lume of smoke that stretches acrossthe Pacific.96

As Time reported:

“The soot-blackened city of Linfen in China’s inland Shanxi provincemakes Dickensian London look as pristine as a nature park. Shanxi isthe heart of China’s coal belt, and the hills around Linfen are dottedwith mines, legal and illegal, and the air is filled with burning coal.Don’t bother hanging your laundry, it’ll turn black before it dries."97

The pollution is now easily visible from space. The satellite photo at the leftshows over 1,000 kilometers of pollution stretching over China. The “AsianBrown Cloud” is a haze of pollution about 3 km thick and sometimes covering anarea as big as Australia.98

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Paradigm shift.

Part of waking up from our trance—orconfronting our delusion—is to recognizethat many of our fundamental values haveto be changed. What is better, to have arecession or to see the North Polar ice capdisappear permanently?

Can you seriously answer that question foryourself?

Consider how George Bush replied to thequestion, and the Kyoto accords inparticular, a treaty signed by 141 nations.

Bush dismissed the Kyoto Protocol as toocostly, describing it as "an unrealistic andever-tightening straitjacket." Lately, the

White House has even questioned the validity o f the science behind globalwarming, and claims that millions of jobs will be lost if the U.S. joins in thisworld pact.99

The Republican take on this problem was that the disappearance of the NorthPolar ice cap may be regrettable, but a recession is worse, and besides, there isadditional oil and gas to extract from the Arctic if the sea ice melted.

Bush’s bete noire, Osama bin-Laden, actually had somethingto say on this:

“You have destroyed nature with your industrial wasteand gases more than any other nation in history.Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreementso that you can secure the profit of your greedycompanies and industries.”100

Recorded human civilization from ancient Sumeria to the present, from theRoman Empire to the Ottoman Empire, never knew a planet without an ice-covered North Pole. There were financial panics, stock market crashes, anddepressions in 1819, 1836, 1857, 1873, 1921, 1929, 1987, and dozens morerecessions and waves of unemployment, civil war, starvation, and world war . .But there was always a polar ice cap!

Asian Brown Cloud

Duped! 35

The proper paradigm shift in thinking is that if we do not stop this coming crisis,mass extinction, flooding, drought, starvation, pandemics, and a vast destructionof the biosphere will result.

We must act now, and in a manner to which we have not been oriented by ourbizarre, self-indulgent, commercial, palliative media. Very few people— evenliterate and informed and “green” Americans—are fully aware of the planetaryclimate collapse facing humanity within the next decade.

A revolutionary action plan.

Lester Brown’s World on the Edge represents one of the most gloomy and yetmost optimistic treatises on this subject. On the gloomy side, Brown frightens hisreader with a litany of statistical evidence, and his assessment that if the WesternAntarctic Ice Sheet breaks off (portions already have) or the Greenland ice sheetdisappears, “the word that comes to mind is chaos. . . we probably cannot savecivilization as we know it.”101

Brown is president of the Earth Policy Institute and suggests the most draconianmeasures:

“At the heart is a call to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions 80percent by 2020 — far more aggressive than anything you'll hear frompolitical leaders or even most activists. It's an ambitious plan, one thatis less concerned with political feasibility than the survivability of theplanet. "This is not Plan A, business as usual," Brown writes. "This isPlan B — a wartime mobilization, an all-out response proportionate tothe threat that global warming presents to our future."102 103

He believes by acting decisively we can reverse global warming in the next eightyears. We actually don’t have much more time than that. Some say less. RichardBetts of the British Meteorological Office says if emissions continue climbingbeyond the next three years, there will be long-term disastrous consequences.104

To stop global warming and retreat from the multiple tipping points we arenearing, and within the next eight years, we have to put in place extremely severeand stoic measures that no politician would ever dream of articulating for fear ofits sheer unpopularity. Brown casts this problem in the most dramatic light:

“In World War II, the sale of new cars was banned. Residentialconstruction was halted. Driving for pleasure was banned. People wererecycling and planting victory gardens. Gasoline, fuel, and sugar wererationed in 1942. The US wanted to produce 60,000 planes, and built229,000.105 A merry-go-round factory made gun mounts. A toycompany made compasses. A corset manufacturer produced grenadebelts. A pinball machine plant made armor piercing shells. The point is

36

that it did not take decades to restructure the U.S. industrial economy. Itdid not take years. It was done in a matter of months. If we couldrestructure the U.S. industrial economy in months, then we canrestructure the world energy economy during this decade.”106

Brown’s Plan B is consistent with the message of this chapter, although the goalsof this chapter merely seek to reduce C02 back to the level of 1990 rather thanBrown’s more ambitious targets. The following recommendations, which includemany of his, are proffered next. They call for a radical revision in our lifestylesand may lead to recession, bring about a depression, or even world war, but inview of planetary climate collapse, all of these measures need to be considered byrational and serious minded people.

To retreat to 1990 emission levels, the U.S. must reduce its carbon footprint byroughly 18 percent. Here are the best suggestions culled from numerous sourcesincluding Brown’s Plan B.

(1) Fuel conservation107

The U.S. currently consumes more gasoline than the next 20 countries combined.Transportation emissions account for roughly 29 percent of total U.S. greenhousegas emissions.108 Increasing the price of gasoline to $8 per gallon over the courseof four years would force immediate conservation. Estimates are that U.S.gasoline consumption could retreat by a factor of 40 percent.2 Fuel subsidieswould be necessary for the poor to accommodate this measure, but the overallimpact would have a major effect in reducing C02. Economist John Mauldin sayssuch a recommendation could impact global warming, as well as the deficit.109

Furthermore, it would be required that no new car could be sold in the U.S. unlessit got a minimum of 32 miles per gallon of gas and, within that same period, toremove all cars from the road that did not get a minimum of 24 mpg inclusive ofAmerica’s wasteful fleet of SUVs.110 These standards would again be increased to35 mpg in 2016 and then to 40 mpg by 2020.111

While Obama’s CAFÉ plan does increase new car mileage requirements, there areno plans to remove gas-guzzlers from American roads which would have animmediate and real impact on C02 emissions. Currently the U.S. fleet (cars andtrucks actually on the road) averages close to 20 mpg. 112

This recommendation is not technologically impossible. There are already 67models that get 32 mpg and five that get 35 mpg. By 2016, that number shouldincrease noticeably.

2 If that estimate is true, this recommendation could bring down total U.S. C02 emissions by 12percent.

Duped! 37

While difficult, such tough measures would have the benefit of significantlyreducing U.S. imports of foreign oil by more than half.

In addition to reducing the impact of theautomobile, the expansion of bicycle,bus, and train travel would be paramount.In the Netherlands, 25 percent of all tripsare made by bicycle. In Denmark thatfigure is 18 percent. In the U.S. it is onepercent! Improving bicycle routes,parking facilities, and bicycle use is quiteeasy to accomplish.

In Copenhagen, for a 20 kroner deposit,you can pick up a bike, ride it all day, andleave it off at any of a number of bike stations and get your deposit back. Similarplans could be considered in American cities as well.

Another promising alternative is bus rapid transit (BRT) that involves longcarriers in dedicated lanes. Using hybrid or natural gas engines, a BRT system ina medium-sized U.S. city could cut emissions by 654,000 tons over 20 years.113

Rail transit leaves 30 percent less of a carbon footprint than automobiles. Andtraveling by train rather than plane can reduce the carbon footprint by as much as90 percent.114 Building high-speed bullet trains is critical. China is currentlyspending $120 billion on high speed rail; the U.S. a paltry $1 billion.115

Putting high-speed rail on the drawing boards now and financing them shouldoccur rapidly, especially in America’s most traveled corridors. Plans for highspeed rail covering 17,000 miles whisking people from LA to Seattle, Dallas toAlbuquerque, and Boston to Washington at 220 mph could cost as much as $600billion. Plans to have this system in 2030 should be shortened to bring it intoexistence by 2020, and cost estimates can be reduced by building lines only in themost heavily used corridors where car and plane traffic can be significantlymitigated.116

(2) Mandatory conservation: electricity, bottles, & food

—Elimination by law of the incandescent light bulb. Replacing incandescent bulbswith CFLs can cut electricity use by 75 percent.117 The U.S. has a long way to go inreducing its electricity usage. Europeans use half as much electricity as Americansdo.

If this single recommendation went worldwide, it would be sufficient to close 705of the world’s 2,800 coal fired plants.

Copenhagen free bike rental stands

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—Flat screen TVs use four times the electricity of their traditional counterparts.All new televisions sold in the U.S. would be required to use 30 percent lesselectricity than currently. California already has such a regulations.

—Retrofit office buildings. Engage in a massive retrofit of American officebuildings to reduce emissions and waste. Such technology already exists andimplementation would significantly reduce emissions. [American office buildingsalone emit twice the carbon as the entire output of India, and older buildingsconsume twice the energy of newer ones.]118

—Plastic bottles. The U.S. currently produces 28 billion plastic bottles everyyear. Banning nonrefillable bottles by law would have numerous positive effects.It would reduce air pollution, water pollution, landfill costs, but most importantlyit would reduce oil imports significantly. Thirteen percent of all U.S. oil importsfrom Saudi Arabia go toward the manufacture of nonrefillable plastic bottles. Itwould save the U.S. 17 million barrels of oil and represent the equivalent ofshutting down 62 coal-fired power plants.119

—Reduction in “food miles." A Canadian study reported that 58 imported foodstraveled an average 2,800 miles to reach the consumer. A second Canadian studysaid carrots from California traveled 59 times further to Toronto than locallygrown carrots. The study calculated the cost of “food miles” of locally grown vs.imported foods with respect to the carbon footprint (See Fig 3A). Transportationof food not grown locally accounts for a large share of food-related greenhousegas emissions and roughly 9 percent of total carbon emissions.120

Duped! 39

Taxing imported food is one approach, but a second is the increase the use of“victory” gardens. The U.S. currently maintains 18 million acres of lawn that getswatered, tended, and mowed with obsessive regularity. The total amount ofacreage used to grow American tomatoes, cauliflower, broccoli and potatoes isless than what Americans currently have growing grass.

Conversion of American lawns to C02 victory gardens could have a major impacton improving the food supply as well as cutting down on greenhouse gasemissions. If a homeowner got a reduction in property taxes for having convertedhalf the lawn to a garden, a significant reduction in the carbon footprint due tofood transportation costs could be expected.

Note that if the U.S. could cut electricity consumption by 30 percent, it would cutcoal-fire electricity generation by 60 percent according to the Rocky MountainInstitute.121 Retrofitting office buildings, regulating more efficient appliances,converting to CFLs, conversion of plastic bottles to non-refillables, and reductionin food miles is just a beginning.

(3) Rationing electricity and red meat

–Electricity. Conservation is one thing, but rationing another. A Swedish studysuggested a 9 percent tax on red meat would reduce consumption and produce aseven percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.122 Yes, taxes on excessconsumption would spur conservation, but taxes impact the poor and do little torestrain the rich, and yet our electricity usage is largely a function of wealth.Thus, rationing is a far more equitable course to pursue.

The idea is to ration electricity based not on wealth or privilege, but number ofadults in the household, setting electricity consumption to 1995 levels. This willrequire many people to turn off their air conditioners, hot tubs, most of their$9,000 refrigerators and to retire those multiple flat screen televisions running inAmerican mega-mansions.

—Red meat. Americans live high up on the food chain with a burly diet heavy ingrain intensive livestock products including red meat. In order to have our redmeat when we want it, we use up twice as much grain as the average Italian andfour times as much as the average Indian.

The proposal is to ration the raising, consumption, import, and export of red meatback to 1995 levels.

Cattle consumption contributes as much to global warming as transportation:“Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions asmeasured in carbon dioxide equivalent . . .nine percent of all CO2 emissions, 37percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide.”123 Release of methane is theprimary culprit. Red meat would not be sold only to the rich, but rationed to allow

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all segments of society equal access. However much McDonald's and other fastfood interests would carp over these requirements, this recommendation couldproduce significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.124

Rationing would not apply to poultry, which provides protein with one-tenth thecarbon footprint as red meat.

Rationing meat and electricity back to 1995 levels in combination with the otherrecommendations should bring the U.S. back to the 18 percent reduction in U.S.C02 emissions we are seeking, or to 1990 levels.

(4) Creation of planetary-wide marine reserves

A consortium of scientists would be convened to identify areas of the planet thatharbor threatened fish species and quarantine the regions in association with U.N.mandates, or preemptively, militarily, and unilaterally, if necessary. This means topatrol large swaths of the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans disallowing allbottom trawling and commercial fishing until fish stocks return to healthy levels.

Today only one percent of the ocean is protected. Sea life improves quickly oncereserves are established. In New England, local populations of snapper increasedforty fold. According to Plan B, managing marine reserves that covere 30 percentof the world oceans would cost $12 billion to $14 billion per year.

“Our study suggests that we could afford to conserve the seas and theirresources in perpetuity, and for less than we are now spending onsubsidies to exploit them unsustainably.”125

Attempting such marine conservation is not without risks of war as competingnavies butt heads over the locations of these reserves.

(5) Major investment in solar, wind, nuclear, & geothermal power

The major source of U.S. emissions, about 72 percent of our greenhouse gases,comes from 20 power plants located in 14 states. These coal-fired power plantsrelease 23 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, and to put them out ofbusiness requires that we find other sources of electricity generation quickly.126

Here are the better ideas:

–Solar. At the end of 2009 there were 23,000 megawatts of solar installations.When operating at peak power, they could match the output of 23 nuclear powerplants. The America Solar Energy Society notes that solar thermal resources inthe U.S. southwest could theoretically satisfy the nation's current electricity needsnearly four times over.”127

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Solar energy has a huge potential to reduce the U.S. carbon footprint. A solarfarm in the U.S. southwest covering an area of 100 square miles could produce 50times more energy in a single day than the entire state of California requires in a24-hour period.128

Currently, however, solar energysupplies less than two percent ofAmerican needs, and projectionsare that it will not result in morethan 10 percent by 2025. Thisneeds to drastically change by arenewed American commitmentto change.

“In June 2007 the firstconcentrating solar powerplant in Nevada went on line.The 64-megawatt facility isthe first modern utility-scalesolar electric power plant inthe U.S. and covers awhopping 250 acres of desertin the El Dorado Valley. It is the largest solar electric power plant tobe built globally in the past 14 years and the third largest solar powerplant in the world. Ironically, the money for the plant was not fromthat of American investors, but Spanish renewable energycompanyAcciona Energia, which invested $262 million in the plant.Nevada could well be the site for more solar thermal plants with adeal signed in 2006 to build a 100-megawatt power plant for SolarRenewable Energy-1 LLC, a company based in the area. Anotherplant is planned for California with a 500-megawatt capability duefor completion on 2012.”129

The potential for solar energy is enormous. Even with today’s solar cells andefficiency levels, it is theoretically possible to produce 35 times more electricitytoday through solar than by fossil fuels and nuclear power if there merely was agreater national commitment to do so.130

–Wind. The U.S. leads the world in wind generating capacity. Texas will have3,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity, the equivalent of 38 coal-firedpower plants. China’s new Wind Baseprogram is creating seven wind mega-complexes of 10-38 gigawatts each in sixprovinces. When completed, these complexeswill have a generating capacity of more than130-gigawatt, equivalent to building one new

Solar farm in the Netherlands

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coal plant per week for two and a half years.131

Denmark now gets 21 percent of its electricity from wind. Plan B would develop4 million megawatts of wind-generating capacity by 2020, enough to cover half ofthe world's electricity consumption by the installation of two million windturbines of two megawatts each. Manufacturing two million wind turbines overthe next 10 years sounds intimidating, until it is compared with the 70 millionautomobiles the world produces each year.”132

The total cost for such an idealistic plan would be $600 billion per year betweennow and 2020 (worldwide).133 This calculation, in perspective, is still less than theU.S. annual military budget.

—Geothermal. MIT scientists theoretically assessed U.S. geothermal electricalgenerating potential at more than 2,000 times current energy needs.134 Ageothermal heat pump uses temperature differentials below the surface to generateheating and cooling. These pumps can reduce residential heating/cooling costs by25-50 percent. To put that in perspective, over an average 20-year lifespan,100,000 units of nominally-sized residential GeoExchange systems will reducegreenhouse gas emissions by almost 1.1 million metric tons of carbon equivalents.That would be the equivalent of converting about 58,700 cars to zero-emissionvehicles, or planting more than 120,000 acres of trees.”135

–Nuclear Power. There are some 440 nuclear power plants in the world thatgenerate roughly 14 percent of the world’s electricity. Sixty new plants areplanned or in construction worldwide. There are proposals for 20 new plants inthe U.S, a figure that could easily be doubled if there were a national will to do so.China has 14 reactors with up to 120 planned or under construction. There is nodoubt that nuclear power is dangerous and should be phased out, but in light ofplanetary climate collapse, this danger needs to be put in context. A rapiddevelopment of reactor generation capacity should take hold immediately. Onceclimate chaos has been mitigated to a sufficient degree, decommissioning of thesefacilities can begin.136 137

One storied consulting firm suggests that the most cost effective and quickestapproach to dealing with alternate energy generation is to expand the nuclearcapacity of the country. 138

In the United States, the single greatest emitter of greenhouse gases comes fromelectricity generation. About 70 percent of U.S. electrical generation comes fromthe burning of fossil fuels. If a massive investment in solar and wind farms occursand more nuclear generation gets online, our reliance on fossil fuels can bereduced significantly. Combined with rationing of electricity and higher taxes ongasoline, the objective of bringing C02 emissions down to 1990 levels is possibleby 2020.

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(6) Cessation of foreign trade with gross polluters i.e., China

There are not many ways of stopping China’s coal burning except throughaltering international trade practices. China's exports have increased six fold inthe last ten years. Its largest trading partners are the euro zone countries and theU.S, which is importing about eight percent of China’s GDP.139 It would beabsurd to think this burgeoning trade has nothing to do with global warming.Since 2000, China has increased its CO2 emissions by nearly 50 percent morethan the rest of the world combined.140

While China has made progress in solar, wind, and even more efficient use ofcoal, more than 80 percent of China's electricity output still comes from burningits domestic coal, which is many times dirtier than other varieties. There is clearlya correlation between export increases and C02 emissions, so the best way to stopChina's emissions is to stop trade.

China’s coal output increased from 1.3 billion tons in 2000 to 2.2 billion tons in2005, making China by far the world’s largest coal producer. China reportedlyadded more thab 90 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plant capacity in 2006alone, more than the entire fleet of generating plants in the United Kingdom.141

This pollution to be stopped, hopefully short of military action. And that means mostimports from China would temporarily cease, which, in turn would mean sayinggoodbye to Wal-Mart for the foreseeable future.

There are precedents for making such a diplomatic initiative. There areinternational treaties, for example, barring trade in endangered species or indolphin-netted tuna, so expanding such treaties to forbid trade with gross polluterscould be theoretically possible. Aggressive efforts to establish binding laws in theWorld Trade Organization (WTO) would be the first step, so both the U.S. andeuro zone countries would be required to reduce their import of Chinese goods.

If this becomes impossible, we cannot throw up our hands and say “I guess wecan’t do anything about global warming without WTO approval.” To the contrary,the paradigm shift we are talking about involves a new militancy. If the WTO willnot permit cessation of trade with gross polluters, then the U.S. must withdrawfrom the WTO and take as many members with it as it can in order to stop globalwarming at any cost with or without the sanction of global trade bodies oragreements.

Possible or not on the diplomatic front, foreign trade with China must bediscontinued. That does not mean all trade with China would stop, but anyproducts manufactured in plants using coal-fired electricity generation would beprohibited. And, frankly, that covers most Chinese imports to the U.S.

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This would certainly give China an incentive to clean up its act, but itsconsequences could be more foreboding and immediate: massive unemployment,populist revolts, trade wars, currency ramifications, and the almost certainconsequence of rising interest rates in the U.S. due to China retaliating by nolonger buying our debt. In turn, there would be the strong chance theseconsequences could throw the U.S. into a deep recession.

Let us not be naïve. These measures are severe and the ramifications incalculable,but weighed against planetary climate collapse, they become necessary andlogical. If introduced gradually, say over a four-year period, some of the mostnegative scenarios might be mitigated, but we should be prepared for moreserious blowback as well.

Indeed, it time to consider all options, time for a major paradigm shift, and time toentertain a radical, new militancy that will be required to defend Mother Earth.3

(7) Global remedies

There are two additional remedies more focused on global matters than on U.S.and Chinese C02 emissions.

– Reforestation. Vast areas of the world are being overcome by soil erosion anddesertification. Planting trees helps to attenuate both and also absorbs carbondioxide. China, for example planted 2.9 million trees. Nigeria called for planting4,300 miles of trees nine miles wide in order to stop the Sahara desert’s rapidexpansion. Plan B suggests planting 30 million trees worldwide, which if onlyhalf survive, would sequester 5.6 million tons of carbon per year.

–Population control. A second initiativeis population control. The earth reachedseveb billion persons in 2011, taking lessthan 14 years to add a billion people. It isexpected to add another billion 15 yearsfrom now. The U.N. expects eight billionpeople by 2025, nine billion by 2043 and10 billion by 2083.142

About 47 percent of population growth isfound in 13 countries, mostly in Africa.

Certainly population control is possible,as is evident with the authoritarian 3 This alternative is similar in nature to the carbon tariff which was included in the Cap and Trade legislationproposed in 2009, prohibiting trade with gross polluters, except that this recommendation would take effectnow while that legislation (which did not pass) would have it take effect in 2020. Note also that someeconomists like Paul Krugman consider the rationale for such an approach superlative. (Ian Fletcher, Ibid,loc. 6330).

Duped! 45

Chinese one-child, one-family policy. However, not all burgeoning populationsare found in countries with authoritarian governments that can enforce thesematters as effectively as the communist party in China.

The Iranian model may be more of interest. In less than two decades, Iran reducedits average family size from seven to three. How did they do it? 143

Iran used four measures that virtually any country could attempt: (1) All personsapplying for a marriage license were required to take a class on contraception. (2)The media made a huge effort to educate the citizenry on contraceptive practices.(3) Women were more aggressively enrolled in school. [There is an importantcorrelation between the educational attainment of women and population control.]Girls enrollment in school went from 60 to 90 percent of eligible females. (4) Allmethods of contraception were provided free by the state including condoms,birth control pills, and vasectomies. These four remedies reduced family size inIran by more than 50 percent within two decades.144

Global efforts to control fertility, particularly in these 13 targeted countries,through education and freely available contraception, could have a major impact.A London School of Economics report says: “If contraception was made widelyavailable between 2010 and 2050, the reduction in unwanted births could saveone billion tons of carbon emissions, roughly 6 years of U.S. emissions.”145

(8) Research

Redirecting resources toward research on clean energy, solar power efficiencies,pollution mitigation and scrubbers, fusion research,4 as well as facilitating thedissemination of these technologies to gross polluting countries through foreignaid grants is necessary and desirable. This should become a national priority asintensely pursued as the Manhattan Project in World War II.

The total amount of U.S. government subsidized research in solar, wind, andgeothermal energy generation combined is roughly 1/400th of the budget of theDepartment of Defense. These kind of appalling statistics clearly illustrate thelevel of delusion and denial that exists in our country with respect to the severityof global warming and the need to face reality.146 5

4 One ingredient many physicists believe could bring fusion within reach is Helium 3, an extremely rareisotope thought to be abundant on the moon. Theoretically, if Helium 3 could act as the catalyst forsuccessful fusion energy generation, three space shuttle missions per year could bring enough fuel to powerthe entire earth. Source: Navarro, Ibid., loc 2416

5 The total private investment in clean energy ($56 billion last year) is similarly paltry. Source: “Cleanenergy investment grows,” Reuters, Jan. 13, 2012.

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How much will it cost?

According to Plan B, the total cost to the U.S. would be roughly 28 percent of ourdefense budget annually, roughly $190 billion, and could bring the nation's C02emissions down to manageable levels in less than a decade. Others have criticizedthese finances as imaginary and suggest the actual costs could be upwards of $4trillion.147

The recommendations proffered here—and not entirely based on Plan B—wereextraordinary: hefty gasoline taxes, rationing of red meat and electricity,mandatory conservation, rapid development of high speed rail, massiveinvestment in wind and solar farming, plus fast-track investments in geothermaland nuclear energy. These steps could alone bring the U.S. within strikingdistance of its 1990 emission levels. Cessation of most foreign trade with China,especially in concert with euro-zone countries, despite all of its risks (war andeconomic upheaval), would have a significant impact on reducing China’s carbonemissions by 2020 as well, and thus the total global carbon footprint. Whether thecost is $190 billion or $4 trillion, a serious and objective analysis of this problemshows there is little choice. A full and complete national commitment isimperative.

Acting locally

Take time to deliberate, but when the time foraction arrives, stop thinking and go in

—Andrew Jackson.

Sometimes these global machinations upset decent and honorable people. It is toofrightening, too mysterious, or too intangible. “Acting globally” seems out-of-reach psychologically for many.

Our heart may demand something we can get our hands on, some more concreteway of feeling that we are doing what we can. Indeed that idealism should not beignored. However, this time it is important to make our actions count.

First, let us immerse ourselves in a bit of humility by recalling that all our “green”actions in the last decade, from conservation, hybrid cars, recycling, reusing, orbecoming vegetarian put virtually no noticeable dent in the global warmingproblem.148 However noble these efforts, they did not work on a global basis—and not even on a national one. Worldwide carbon emission increased. Even U.S.emissions increased. According to Professor David Read of the Royal Society:“U.S. emissions are not decreasing, but they are actually increasing on an annualbasis.”149

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So the new paradigm requires going far beyond personal efforts to conserve. Hereare four “local” yet militant recommendations to consider:

1. Picket polluters and guzzlers: Picket automobile distributors of the toppolluting cars to inform customers to avoid these vehicles. Mercedes-BenzGL320, Jeep Grand Cherokee, Hummer, Volkswagen Touareg V10,Chevrolet Tahoe, GMC Yukon, and Dodge Ram dealerships are just somelocations where demonstrators can be posted. 150

2. Picket fast food: Cut back significantly on red meat, and use the Internetto organize like-minded persons to picket McDonalds, Carls Jr., Wendys,Burger King, Sizzler, and the Outback Steak House to demand red meatconsumption decline. Educate fast food customers about the impact theraising of red meat has on global warming. Urge them to eat poultry.

3. Picket shark slaughter: A bowl of shark fin soup retails in Tokyo for$100, and the fins sell for $250 per pound. The World Wildlife Fundestimated that in the 1990s between 40-70 million sharks were slaughteredeach year.151 Organize your internet colleagues to join you in front ofAsian markets that sell frozen shark fins. Pass out bilingual brochures infront of Chinese and Japaneserestaurants that serve shark finsoup, telling customers their moneyis funding the extermination of aspecies that has occupied this planetfor 200 million years.152 Thosebrochures should admonishcustomers never to frequent therestaurant again—not simply to

avoid the soup.

4. Picket “Made in China”

It is important to remember as amantra a comment made by anAmerican CEO of Wisconsin Energy Corporation: “Anything that wedo—if China does not stop its coal burning CO2 emissions—will notamount to anything.”153

In addition to China’s rapid building of coal-fired plants, it also has adiesel truck fleet—all 10 million vehicles—that burn fuel contaminatedwith more than 130 times the pollution-causing sulfur that the UnitedStates allows in most diesel.154 Dirty and cheaper diesel fuel, laxregulations, and a failure by the Chinese government to require and use atechnology that already exists to clean it up, impacts not just the Chinese,but the entire planet. When you purchase from Wal-Mart, you purchase

Shark fin catch. Each shark whose finshave been taken dies a slow and grueling

death. Pursuit of this “delicacy” is themajor cause of the decline of sharks

worldwide.

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products made in factories powered by coal-fired electricity and deliveredby trucks that spew carcinogenic soot, nitrous oxide, and sulphur into theatmosphere at levels that would never be permitted in the U.S.155 Thatpollution, in turn, reaches Los Angeles, where 25 percent of contaminationin the city's skies comes from China.156

Dispatch pickets to Wal-Mart,6 Toys-R-Us, J.C. Penny, CVS, Rite-Aide,Longs, and Target urging customers to boycott products made in Chinathat are manufactured in plants electrified with coal.157 Start a globalinternet movement that shows itself in the streets in effective boycotts.Research what products and firms sell Chinese-made products and releasepickets to these stores, educating shoppers about how items are made inthe most polluting factories in the world and delivered to ports in the mosttoxic trucks known to man.

These initiatives might just nudge China to convert to cleaner fuels andretrofit its trucks with emission controls rapidly enough not to lose itslucrative export businesses. Similar actions were successful with dolphin-netted tuna fishing, so intelligent “local” action on these fronts might havesome effect too.

There are many personal initiatives to consider. This is merely a starter-kit

A note about narcissism

In New York City, many decades ago, there was a complete electrical blackout.After a few hours, the lights returned. Some two dozen people showed up at cityhall and “surrendered.” They confessed they were responsible for causing thepower outages. Some said they were repairing home electric drills when all thelights in the city went out. Others apologized for plugging in their stereo whensuddenly the whole city went black. They thought they were responsible, and theiractions were the cause of the disaster.

But the cause was not their innocentactivity, but a Canadian electricalfailure that shut down New York’s grid.

So, it is important not fall into the trapof thinking that if we wish for it, it willhappen, or that if we alter our personalbehavior and become “greener,” thiswill have anything to do with rescuingthe planet. If you planted a tree in yourback yard, recycled your aluminum 6 Wal-Mart this year alone will sell $18 billion in Chinese made products in the U.S.Source:http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10355608-54.html

New York City during Blackout

Duped! 49

cans, bought an energy efficient air-conditioner, switched to a hybrid, suchcomforting—and comfortable—actions, regrettably, had no significant remedialeffect on our carbon footprint. Yes, these efforts are admirable, and if you gave upred meat, you certainly made a step in the right direction, but in the bigger picture,these are impotent palliatives. However ethical these efforts appear, it is still theAtherton response to global warming. It is the New Yorker believing theirbehavior moves the entire city. It is a narcissistic device. These gestures are notthe solution. The solution is national and global, not personal and individual.

Our choices are not easy.

They are not convenient.

The world has to stop,

The world is out of control.

The actions required are radical.

A new militancy must be found.

A revolution is required.

A planetary disaster is heading our way.

It will occur in our lifetime.

And it has to be stopped.

Now!

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Absent the rapid mobilization of climate advocates at every level—and the pooling of all their energy, creativity, and resources into acoordinated, no-holds-barred campaign—we will soon be crossing

the threshold into climate hell.

—Ross Gelbspan, The Big Name Game

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Endnotes

1 Harry G. Frankfurt, Princeton University Press2 See, Bugliosi, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for murder. MA: Vanguard, 2008.3 Bugliosi, Ibid.4 Bugliosi, p. 137.5 http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-06-poll-iraq_x.htm6 www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf7 http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-06-16-al-qaeda-comments-by-bush_x.htm8 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/bushtext_031703.html9 Quotes cited in Bugliosi p. 14210 Bugliosi, Ibid., p. 118.11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atta_in_Prague12 Bugliosi, Ibid, p. 144.13 Bugliosi Ibid, p. 83.14 See 9/11 Commission Report; Bugliosi Ibid, p. 109.15 Bugliosi, Ibid, p. 45.16 Weisman, Jonathan (2006-09-10). "Saddam had no links to al-Qaeda". The Age. See alsohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_link_allegations17 http://www.noyemi.com/quote24428.html18 http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/americans-global-warming-concerns-continue-drop.aspx19 “Where did global warming go,” New York Times, Oct. 16, 2011, p. 7.20 University of Michgan and Muhlenberg College poll reported in The News, Mexico City, Feb. 29,2012.21 http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/20110806000222 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft8LfE7AI2w23 http://www.grist.org/climate-change/2011-11-16-experts-debunk-polls-claiming-fewer-americans-believe-in-climate24 http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=341825 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change26 http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/06/scientists-overwhelmingly-believe-in-man-made-climate-change/127

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/energy_update28 Richard Horwitz, “American’s problems with global warming,”http://myweb.uiowa.edu/rhorwitz/globalwarming.htm29 Arthur Max, AP, “2010 on tract to be of 3 hottest years on record.” SF. Chronicle12/31/1030 Sheila Watt- Cloutier, Sierra Club Currents, Vol 6, #54, March, 07.31 New York Times, January 8, 2004.32 Photo of ice shelf collapse courtesy of NASA's Terra satellite, supplied by Ted Scambos, NationalSnow and Ice Center, University of Colorado, Boulder.33 Whiktley Strieber, The coming global superstorm, New York: Pocket Star Books, 1999.34 Jeffrey Kluger, “The turning point,” Time, April 3, 2006.35 “The Long Burn.” Science News, July 8, 2006, p. 19.36 Brown, Ibid., location 3037 Brown, Ibid., location 3438 Brown, Ibid., location 37-4039 Brown, Ibid,. location 15140 Brown, Ibid., location 164

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41 Brown, ibid., location 16742 Brown, Ibid, location 160.43 http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/polar-caps.html44 “In 2007, Greenland set a melting record.” Science News Jan. 5, 2008.45 “USA Today, Sept 13, 2007, p. 346 “Bird’s eye view of Antarctic ice loss,” Science News, 2008.47 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7807943.stm48 San Francisco Chronicle, “Warming oceans,” Sept 14, 2011, p. A2.49 http://news.yahoo.com/oceans-turning-acidic-faster-past-300-million-years-164401538.html50 Siberian Lakes Disappearing, Washington Post, June 6, 200651 Lester Brown, Ibid., location 52.52 Russ Kick (Ed), Everything you know is wrong. Location 466753 Janet Raloff, “Empty Nets,” Science News, June 4, 2005, Vol 167.54 Catch Zero, Science News, July 26, 2003, Vol. 164, p. 59.55 “Worthless waters: by mid-century seas value may be drained.” Science News, Nov 4, 2006, p. 291.56 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5037/is_/ai_n1829085657 Commercial Bottom Trawling and Deep Sea Corals-http://jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu/fieldcourses06/PapersMarineEcologyArticles/CommercialBottomTrawlingaA.html58 Brown, The World on the Edge, location 271.59 Lester Brown, The World on the Edge, New York: Norton, 2011, location 10360 Brown, Ibid, location 9561 Brown, Ibid, location 10562 http://news.mongabay.com/2005/1124-climate.html63 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5314592.stm64 http://www.slate.com/id/2178595/ Note that the Arctic not only stores methane, but the top meter ofArctic tundra contains200 trillion kilograms of carbon, which, if released through warming, some havecalled “the big Arctic carbon bomb.” Science News July 5, 2008, p. 29.65 Brian Handwerk “Global warming could cause mass extinctions.” National Geographic News, April,200666 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/372219.stm67 See Andrew Whalen, “World Bank warns of danger in Andes,” Associated Press, Feb 18, 2009.68 “Arctic water may cool off Europe,” report by University College London, Reuters, The News, Jan23, 2012.69 Ross Gelbspan, “The Big Name Game,” Grist Magazine, 31 Jul 200270 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632717/71 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change72 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3337100/Biofuels-could-increase-carbon-emissions.html73 http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2011/2011-11-16-03.html74 data compiled by computing average residential usage: source:http://www.ecdms.energy.ca.gov/elecbycounty.asp75 http://www.humboldtnews.com/main.asp?SectionID=12&SubSectionID=12&ArticleID=725276 http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/press/press184.html77 http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2011/2011-08-18-091.html78 Justin Gillis, “Global carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 show the biggest jump ever recorded.” NewYork Times, Dec 5, 2011.79 Seth Borenstein, AP, “Greenhouse gases soaring, The News, Dec 30, 2011, p. 12.80 http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/42205/story.htm81 CO2 emissions sped up after 2000. Theage.com.au82 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions

83 The United States, accounts for nearly 90% of North American GDP about 68% of its population,also is responsible for 85% of North America’s carbon emissions.

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84 http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/31/world-carbon-dioxide-emissions-country-data-co285 http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-6706554.html86 http://www.elrst.com/2008/06/16/world-co2-emissions-rose-by-31-percent-last-year/87

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions#List_of_countries_by_2010_emissions_estimates88 http://www.epi.org/publication/counting_the_jobs_lost_to_china/89 http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/06/0502/art1.html90 Navarro, Ibid, loc 366.91 Navarro, Ibid, loc. 101792 Navarro, Ibid, loc. 605.93 Navarro Ibid, loc. 100994 Navarro, Ibid, loc 268995 http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/11/china-discovers.html96 Ian Fletcher, Ibid, location 199.97 Cited in Navarro, Ibid, loc. 263298 http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/427499 http://usliberals.about.com/od/environmentalconcerns/p/KyotoProtocol.htm100 Osama bin Laden, “Letter to the American People,” The Guardian Unlimited, Nov. 24, 2002.101 Brown, Ibid, location 575102 Source: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1700189,00.html

103 See also: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1700189,00.html#ixzz1iyPAH72f104 Janet Raioff, “Studies see 4 degrees of warming,” Science News, Dec 18, 2010.105 Brown, Ibid, location 586106 Brown, Ibid, location 58

107 Sources of data in this section come from the following sources: Global Climate Change, James C.White, NY Plenum Press, 1992 see also http://books.google.com.mx/books?id=-l9uqzD0jDEC&pg=PA23&dq=32+mpg+and+global+warming&hl=es-419&sa=X&ei=wrwKT6ywKYTo2gW17LH-DQ&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=32%20mpg%20and%20global%20warming&f=fals; alsoon http://books.google.com.mx/books?id=-l9uqzD0jDEC&pg=PA23&dq=32+mpg+and+global+warming&hl=es-419&sa=X&ei=wrwKT6ywKYTo2gW17LH-DQ&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=32%20mpg%20and%20global%20warming&f=false; asosee http://autos.aol.com/car-finder/mpg-32/2/ see alsohttp://books.google.com.mx/books?id=MwTMPRNmo0IC&pg=PA513&dq=32+mpg+and+oil+imports&hl=es-419&sa=X&ei=YrwKT_KKE6jm2gWP_9H6Aw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=32%20mpg%20and%20oil%20imports&f=false

108 http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/32000/32700/32779/DOT_Climate_Change_Report_-_April_2010_-_Volume_1_and_2.pdf109 John Mauldin, The Endgame, New York: John Wiley, 2011, location 3615.

111 http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2011/2011-08-02-091.html112 http://www.project.org/info.php?recordID=384113

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/environment/article/0,28804,1602354_1603074_1603122,00.html114 http://www.seat61.com/CO2flights.htm115 Brown, Ibid, location 332.

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116

117 Brown, Ibid, location 296.118 Building on Success, Loperr, Ungar, Weitz, et.al., Alliance to Save Energy, 2005. See also StevenChu, “US must invset in technologies to avoid energy crisis.” Science News Oct 25, 2008.119 Brown, Ibid, location 342120 http://www.climatechoices.org.uk/pages/food3.htm121 http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2009/02/09/efficiency-alone-could-cut-us-electricity-use-30-percent-rmi-study

122

http://www.science20.com/science_20/thanks_economists_more_taxes_meat_will_reduce_global_warming-75633

123 http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0220/p03s01-ussc.html

124 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/30/food.ethicalliving

125 Brown, Ibid, From Andrew Balmford of the Conservation Science Group at Cambridge University.Location 4465.

126 The News, Mexico City, citing EPA report for 2010, January 12, 2012, p. 11.127 Brown, ibid, location 372128 http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/solarenergy.aspx129 http://www.gizmag.com/go/8032/130 http://home.iprimus.com.au/nielsens/solen.html131 Brown, Ibid, location 355132 Brown, Ibid.133 Brown, Ibid, location 361134 Brown, Ibid, location 381135 http://me1065.wikidot.com/geothermal-home-heating-and-cooling

136 Source: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf17.html

137 Ken Salazar, Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, said that if there were a national commitment, wellplaced wind power farms operating off the East Coast of the US could generate enough power to halt allcoal-burning plants now operating in the US. Wayne Parry, Associated Press “Interior chief favors windover coal.” April 7, 2009.138 http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/12/mckinsey-plan-and-analysis-for.html139 Ian Fletcher, Ibid, location1113

140 source: http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/category/climate-forcings/greenhouse-gases/

141 Source: http://www.c2es.org/global-warming-basics/coalfacts.cfm

142 Joel Cohen, “7 billion,” New York Times, Oct 24, 2011.143

http://ase.tufts.edu/econ/events/neudcDocs/SaturdaySession/Session012/AHashemiFamilyPlanningProgramEffects.pdf144 Brown, Ibid.

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145 http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10355608-54.html146 http://www.defense.gov/news/Feb2005/d20050207budget.pdf147 http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/07/lester-brown-plan-b-is-mathematically.html148 The delivery of food to the consumer, particularly meats, accounts for only 4% of greenhouse gasemissions, while production contributes a hefty 83%. “For Food’s ecological impact, meat means morethan miles.” Science News, May 24, 2008.149 http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2006/2006-04-18-02.asp150 http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2008/07/whats-most-polluting-car151 Bill Bryson, A short history of nearly everything. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.152 http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/law/lwsch/journals/bciclr/24_2/07_TXT.htm153 Gale Klappa, CEO, on “Mad Money,” MSNBC, Mar, 20, 2009154 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/07/asia/china.php155 The United States allows maximum sulfur concentrations of just 15 parts per million for most dieselfuels, while China allows up to 2,000 parts per million. The average sulfur in American gasoline islimited to 30 parts per million; China allows up to 800 parts per million. Source:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/08/world/asia/08trucks.html?pagewanted=print156 http://articles.latimes.com/2007/oct/07/opinion/op-garrett7157 China has been urged to convert to gas-fired power plants which are twice as efficient, but it hasbeen reluctant. It does have a demonstration plant engineered with General Electric turbines, however,and the technology exists. Source: Mark Lander, “Clinton urges China to curb greenhouse gases,” NewYork Times Feb. 23, 2009