Ron Paul stands for a lot of things that I think are nutty, like his untried libertarian utopian ideas. Under normal circumstances, I would never consider urging my American neighbours to vote for a libertarian.

These are not normal circumstances.

The US has reached a point of political-economic crisis – you cannot separate the two – and as a result the responses are limited and non-ideal. In a crisis you must take decisive action or events may overwhelm you – they may anyway, as a crisis is by definition somewhere between bordering on chaos and all-out anarchy.

At this point, the urgent need is to neutralize the power of corporations and the rich over the US government or nothing else will matter. Yes, climate change, peak oil, the current depression, and so on are all serious crises. The sad fact is that they all exist to the extent they do largely because of corruption in the United States government.

Until this corruption is rooted out, there is little chance of serious action on climate, on oil dependency, or of the US and world economy recovering. If you disagree with me, please show me what President Obama has done that will make a real difference with these crises.

You can trade an Obama for a Romney/Gingrich/whoever and things will get worse faster, but either way the crises we face will not be addressed.

Ron Paul has some scary ideas and libertarianism is untried utopian lunacy, but because of the extent of the corruption in the US government, he’s the only candidate who has a chance of stopping the American slide – and they’re going to drag a lot of us with them – into a police-state plutarchy.

I don’t say this lightly; electing Ron Paul is potentially a dangerous step but far less dangerous than hoping for change from Obama or any of the other Republican candidates. Ron Paul is anti-empire, anti-police-state, and pro-Constitution, which Americans desperately need to remember matters before it’s too late.

The world oil supply is running down and we have no ready substitutes.

Climate change is happening now – stronger storms, more devastating wildfires, rising sea levels, diseases spreading – the list goes on, and there is every indication that it will continue to worsen.

The US economy, upon which the world economy still depends, is unstable due to corruption at the top, from most Congressmen to presidential advisors all being former bank executives.

Our leaders are not moving quickly enough to protect the economy in general, never mind your or my livelihoods in particular. Some of our leaders are actually doing things to worsen the situation, such as denying the very existence of climate change or ignoring the ever-rising price of oil.

We are facing “interesting times.” The turbulence has begun, and it’s buffeting us from all directions. Have you ever had the experience of going for a walk and, no matter which direction you were going, the wind always seemed to be in your face? That’s what the future is going to feel like for many people.

I could (and have) proposed large-scale responses to the situation, which frankly at this point need to be a WWII-scale mobilization to re-industrialize and re-do our living arrangements to drastically cut oil dependence immediately and, long-term, eliminate pollution of all kinds by moving to a ‘restorative economy.’

But we’re not going to do that in the foreseeable future, are we? Or anything even remotely close. If you take your family’s security seriously, then you will do what you can to buffer yourself against the coming storms. The best way I have seen to do that is Transition Initiative, and you should seriously consider joining (or starting) one in your area.

TI is a completely grassroots, apolitical initiative, and this is what they do:

Transition Network helps communities deal with climate change and shrinking supplies of cheap energy (peak oil). This process, which we call Transition, aims to create stronger, happier communities.

That’s how we’re going to get through this; by working together in local communities. As the Transition Network site puts it well:

What we are convinced of is this:

• • if we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too late
  • if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little
  • but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.

Your level of involvement can be minimal or massive; the choice is yours. Here are some things that local TIs do:

• Teach people how to grow a garden, save seeds, preserve foods
• Educate people by showing documentaries about peak oil, climate change, solutions, and more
• Host online and IRL forums to discuss and learn
• Show people how to insulate their homes or build a solar greenhouse

Like it or not, the world is changing. You can adapt, or not.

Helen Caldicott and George Monbiot have recently attacked each other in anti and pro-nuclear articles, and honestly I now am entirely unsure of the truth. Both claim scientific backing, though Monbiot appears to shred Caldicott’s claims. I have a great deal of respect for Monbiot; back when I was doing my own research on climate change (I was a sceptic and was attempting to see if it was real, was human-caused, was dangerous, etc, and I read lots of real science in the process), I found him to be ruthlessly honest and perfectly aligned with the actual science.

That said, I think the pro-nuke crowd, now including George Monbiot, is making two grave errors. The first is claiming that low levels of radiation are safe.

As an example of this, something that really struck me as a blow to the nuke movement was a seemingly unrelated article posted on Reddit a few weeks or so ago discussing the nude-o-scanners used by the TSA. The author interviewed a scientist who flat-out said that the scanners would cause cancer in some people. The reasoning went thusly:

• The risk of a mutation caused by the scanners is very low, say 1-in-10,000,000
• However, many tens of millions of people pass through the scanners each year
• Therefore, some of those people will develop cancer caused by radiation from the scanners

In this case, “low risk” still means “will cause cancer in some people.” Not everyone wants to take that risk, and may be unhappy about others forcing that risk upon them.

This brings me to my second point; Monbiot seems just as political in supporting nuclear energy as Caldicott is in opposing it. In fact, this seems a common theme among many pro-nuclear ‘environmentalists.’ Take these paragraphs from his article, my emphasis added:

If…we make the wrong decisions, the consequences can be momentous. …that countries [will] shut down their nuclear power plants or stop the construction of new ones, and switch instead to fossil fuels. Almost all of us would prefer them to switch to renewables, but it seems that this is less likely to happen.

In response to the Fukushima disaster, for example, the German government insists that it will replace its nuclear plants with new renewable power sources – particularly large wind farms. But as most of its wind is in the north and much of its nuclear capacity is in the south, this will require a massive new construction of power lines. That gives the government just as much of a political headache as the current anti-nuclear protests. The new lines are also likely to take around 12 years to build, raising the possibility of shortages.

In other words, Monbiot (and “almost all of us”) think renewables are a better idea, but will support nuclear because it seems politically more feasible. Chalk one up for the nuclear lobby. He also states that new power lines will take about 12 years to build – which is about the amount of time required to build a nuclear plant, assuming it’s not stopped by the kinds of mass protests recently seen in Germany.

Monbiot digs himself in deeper by assuming that power lines will be opposed equally as have been nuclear plants, but this seems a stretch.

In his book Heat: How to stop the planet from burning, Monbiot thoroughly analyses nuclear energy, and some of the dangers he points out are not trivial:

• p. 90: “…every nuclear power station leaks radiation into the environment. As well as their routine emissions into the air and the sea, the nuclear generators are surrounded by dumping scandals.” He then goes on to detail numerous examples, and as we have seen with Fukushima, the same leaks and cover-ups occurred there.
• p. 92: Monbiot discusses the intractable and so-far insoluble problem of nuclear waste, and that there have also been cover-ups in this department, in which proponents of the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada “falsified the rates at which water percolates through it.”
• pp. 92-95: Monbiot discusses the financial cost of nuclear power, concluding that it only exists courtesy of large taxpayer subsidies and that the actual “price of nuclear power is a function of your political position.”
• p. 97: “…sixteen years would be needed to obtain finance and planning permission and to design a build [a new nuclear] plant.” Monbiot does agree that this timeline also rules out any large-scale energy development, and so the government would have to fast-track (i.e. ram through) projects like this.

And Monbiot’s conclusion?

Because of the industry’s record of corner-cutting, because of its association with weapons of mass destruction and because of the unresolved questions about waste disposal and energy balance, I will provisionally place nuclear power second from last in my list of preferences, just above generation using coal from open-cast mines.

So George – which of these things has changed in the last few years? The answer, of course, is none. The only thing that has changed seems to be that Monbiot has abandoned hope that we will embrace renewables or conservation – for political reasons. He has thus given up and is now shilling for his “second from last” energy choice, the one he places one short step above coal, because he thinks that’s the best we can get – even though it’s not very good at all.

George Monbiot is entitled to his change of political views. But to become a proponent of nuclear power now, not because it’s better than the alternatives or even necessary, but because that’s all the nuclear lobby will allow, is a disgrace. His words again:

This is an especially difficult time to try to make the case for keeping the dangers of nuclear power in perspective. The frightening events at Fukushima are still unfolding, the disaster has been upgraded to category 7, making it one of the two worst such events on record. But it is just when the case is hardest that it most urgently needs to be made, however much anger this generates. If we don’t stick to the facts, if we don’t subject all claims to the same degree of scepticism, we could make a bad situation worse.

Sometimes, George, the reason the case is hard to make is because it’s not a very good case. And yes, we should stick to the facts. Those facts are that conservation and renewable energy are the best, and ultimately the only, path out of our current spiralling energy addiction that is causing climate change. Nuclear power is at best a stopgap measure; it just pushes the problem down the road a ways.

Forget immediate concerns about irradiated food and water, and increased cancer risk, for the moment; let’s say they’re exaggerated or a trade-off we’re willing to make in order to phase out coal (because conservation and renewable energy are ‘politically more difficult.’) A nuclear accident like Fukushima has the potential to render large areas uninhabitable for generations. What is the cost of that?

And consider this; if we decide to forge ahead with nuclear power, we will need thousands more nuclear plants all over the world, including in many countries far less politically stable or technologically advanced as Japan. The risk of accidents will surely increase exponentially, as will the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Finally, not a damn word about conservation, which could cut our need for energy enough to make battles over nuclear versus renewable much less of a concern – and, if we don’t start conserving, will ultimately lead to massive energy generating plants and related problems all over the globe anyway.

George Monbiot, I am disappointed.

******************

UPDATE: Guy Dauncey has written an excellent dissection of nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima: Nuclear – Hope or Hype? It is an extract from his equally good book, The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming. Dauncey takes a no-nonsense, fact-based approach to his evaluation, looking at nuclear from all angles: economic, waste storage, global warming, and more.

Following the multiple partial meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, I find it mind-boggling how quickly the pro-nuclear shills are out claiming that a) nuclear is safe, really, and b) it’s our only hope for a future energy source that is sufficient to meet our needs and not destroy the planet via climate change.

Both are utterly bogus, but you can’t tell the shills that; they are fanatics on a par with the climate change deniers. They believe what they want to believe, and that’s that.

a) Nuclear power is NOT safe

Sorry, lads, but it just isn’t and to maintain that in the face of what has happened and is happening in Japan is just nuts. Numerous dolts are trying to claim that nuclear power is perfectly safe, but that can be disproved with a simple Google search, so I must conclude that people who say this are wilfully dense or are paid shills.

As to the safety record of nuclear power generally, it’s really quite poor. Again, numerous pro-nukers want to say the risk of accident is minuscule. Again, not true. It’s easy enough to get a rough calculation of the odds of disaster: Divide the number of nuclear plants on the planet by the number of major disasters:

According to this site, there were 442 plants as of January 2011. According to Wikipedia, there have been at least 18 serious accidents, so the odds of a serious accident are 18/442 = 4%, or 1 in 25.

Those are terrible odds, and that’s not counting the countless smaller leaks that are routinely covered up by the nuclear industry.

(Note: This is being generous. In reality, the odds are worse because most of these accidents happened when there were fewer nuclear reactors on the planet. And the argument that newer reactors is safer is debatable techno-optimism, given the recent meltdowns in Japan.)

The shills often then retreat to the position that nuclear is safer than coal, but this is hardly difficult and not-at-all comforting. We simply have to stop buying into the idea that we have no choice but to trade off the greater evil for the lesser.

b) It’s nuclear or collapse!!!!

This is simply scaremongering by the shills to prevent us thinking sensibly about other options, like heaven forbid, conservation. Or passive solar combined with geothermal storage. Or storing excess wind/solar/wave/tidal/whatever in molten salts, pumped hydro, hydrogen, and whatever else we come up with, none of which risk making large areas of one’s country, and perhaps a few neighbouring ones, uninhabitable by humans for the next 100,000 years or so.

The fact is, we have non-nuclear options and we need to start exploring them. There may well be a further economic collapse as the price of oil increases, but building hundreds more nuclear plants everywhere is a highly risky ‘solution.’ There are better ways to go.

And by-the-way, Japan’s wind turbines survived the earthquake and tsunami.

UPDATE: An interesting article, from the Toronto Sun, of all places. It contains this gem:

The potential power, energy and financial returns were calculated for the indirect subsidy that is currently provided to the U.S. nuclear industry in the form of liability caps, with providing the same level of indirect subsidy to the solar photovoltaic manufacturing industry in the form of loan guarantees. The startling results show even if just this one relatively minor subsidy was diverted from nuclear power generation into large-scale solar manufacturing, it would result in both more installed power and more energy produced by mid-century. Such a policy would increase the cumulative solar industry over the 500 TW-hrs mark in just 10 years and by the end of the study the cumulative electricity output of solar amounts to an additional 48,600 TW-hrs worth more than $5 trillion over the nuclear case.

Those of you who follow me know that I have recently ceased making posts urging large-scale reform. The reasons for that are fairly simple, but they involve a psychological hurdle to get over.

I have been communicating with James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer, and David Holmgren, all of whom I have interviewed, about a Wise Action Plan. The goal was for us to agree on this Plan and then publicly pronounce it in an effort to get some sensible action on peak oil and climate change. Initially, I urged a response that included a revitalization of rail, large-scale wind or solar farms, and other actions that require the federal government to take a strong leadership role.

While the others generally agreed such actions would be a good idea, especially if they have been started 20 or more years ago, two of the three thought they were a waste of time. They had two reasons for this:

1. It’s too late. We needed to be getting off oil while we still had a surplus. Now that we’ve hit peak oil, diverting any oil to build solar panels means there is less for cars or crops.
2. They ain’t gonna. What politician is going to do that, barring an emergency situation? (Emergency is here defined as rioting, fuel rationing, or other severe measures.)

To be fair to our politicians, it’s hard to get elected telling people their lifestyle is going to change drastically, including many of them giving up their cars. The problem is partly cultural; we want what we want, and we’re going to keep electing politicians who give it to us until that is no longer possible.

And to be brutally honest, most of us have bought into the idea of unending growth and improvement, that the market will find solutions to concerns like oil depletion, and that if it were really that bad, somebody would do something.

At that point, we will be well into the emergency.

It has been difficult for me to give up on the idea of leadership from above. I ran federally as a Green Party of Canada candidate last go-round, but wouldn’t do it again. Even in the fantastic unlikelihood that the Greens got a majority next election, they could not do what needs to be done. Still too many people will resist change, and this resistance will be encouraged and financed – by vested interests.

Think Globally, Act Locally

As a result, I’ve gone local. Leadership is going to have to come from the grassroots, from us, from those who understand the reality and are willing to take some action. I believe that every village, town, city, and region should create a Transition Initiative to get off oil.

This is acting locally, and it is vitally important for your survival. Local resilience is ‘in,’ and for good reason. When oil prices go up, imports of everything – including food – are going to get more expensive and harder to get. If you’re already shopping at the farmer’s market, for example, you have helped support a local farmer who will now support you as options in the supermarkets get scarcer and pricier.

This is my new Wise Action Plan:

1. Start or join a Transition Initiative in your area.
2. Reskill.
3. Develop personal self-reliance, which includes everything from starting a garden to insulating your house.

If we’re lucky and good, these local movements will take off, multiply like viruses, and infect the planet. These local movements will bond together and require their governments to do the right thing – to protect us. They will do this not by lobbying or influence-peddling, but by sheer strength of numbers.

The purpose of this site is to find a ‘green’ lever big enough to move the world to sustainability. I titled it Go Green or Die because, well, that is true, we must, and becauseI thought it rather catchy.

That said, I have come to realise that people will not see climate change and peak oil as the crises they are unless and until a social tipping point is reached, where likely we will go from denial to near-panic. Various things can push us toward this tipping point; this site is my own small attempt, as are my The Way Home presentations, but we are not there yet and we are already late getting started on addressing these crises.

And that brings me to the main point. We cannot count upon governments or corporations – large organizations led by people with a strong vested interest in business-as-usual – to wake up and take action on climate change and peak oil in time.

I have come to accept this, and I won’t say I found it easy. I ran as as Green Party of Canada candidate in the last federal election, and as a Green Party of British Columbia candidate in the last provincial election. Clearly I recently thought that action at the national or provincial level was possible; I no longer think so.

It would be a long story to explain all my reasons why, but perhaps a small, real example will help illustrate. In the last provincial election, Lana Popham was one of my opponents as the NDP candidate. She seemed as ‘green’ as me; in talking with her, she clearly understood the threat posed by climate change. Her family runs an organic vineyard. She cycles everywhere.

I nearly withdrew to give her a clear run, but was persuaded otherwise. She won anyway. What has been the result? Her party formed the Opposition, and made her Agriculture Critic. The leaders of the NDP have her spending her time and energy and goodwill campaigning to get bicycles exempted from a new tax.

And that is just a tiny example of why change is unlikely to come from above. It rarely does, really; those entrenched naturally oppose change.

I came to realise that it is up to us. “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” as the song says. We must at least work to save local areas as best we can, to make them sustainable and self-reliant. Done alone, that will not ultimately stop or save anyone from climate change. It will only buffer against the coming oil shock and allow life to continue in a somewhat civilised manner.

The best route I’ve found so far is Transition Initiative, which every town and city and region should be doing. It’s a grassroots movement to make the local region more self-reliant, less dependent upon oil. There is no head office, no Executive Director. There are only guiding principles and local examples.

This is all a long way of saying that I’ve joined my local Transition Initiative. That is where the action is going to come from. The movement has caught on and has spread like wildfire, which gives me hope for wider action. It would be wonderful if ultimately there were thousands and thousands of Transition Towns, and these millions upon millions of people joined forces to end dependence on fossil fuels.

This journey has allowed me to create The Way Home presentation that ends on a positive, optimistic note. I was trained by Al Gore to deliver the An Inconvenient Truth presentation, which I did 40-or-so times to a few thousand people in total. One thing that always bothered me was the lack of realistic solutions offered. I don’t mean just the “Change your lightbulbs” ‘solution,’ but even writing to your elected representative is largely a waste of time at this point.

Transition Initiatives do offer hope. I am going to re-do this site in the next few weeks to reflect the path we must take. Yes, we must ‘go green or die.’ But that message is not inspiring change. In an attempt to communicate the extent of the threat, it inspires fear.

What we need is the truth, which is that things are bad. We have not responded appropriately to warnings from experts, and we are going to pay a price for that. Ok, so what do we do? Reality must be faced, and realistic action must be taken. That is the focus of the Transition Initiative, and also of the new look of this site, which will become The Way Home.

It is common for people who are concerned about looming catastrophes like climate change and peak oil to appeal to the humanity of those doing the damage. They think that, if only they could have a word with people like former U.S. President Bush or current Canadian Prime Minister Harper, climate action obstructors both, they could get through with an appeal about caring for their own children. This is highly unlikely, and more importantly, is a waste of precious time.

It is not that these people do not care about their children, but that they have a different morality than you and I. We like to think that, deep down, everyone is just like us. This is a dangerous delusion, and it should be clear to anyone who observes human behaviour even briefly. There are some obvious examples, including psychopaths who murder others for reasons we don’t understand, like Jeffrey Dahmer who murdered and ate young men, or Clifford Olsen who was a serial child murderer, or the freaks who go into a school and start shooting. These people are not like us, they clearly have a different morality, and it matters little whether it is due to nature or nurture: Either way, we must protect ourselves from their dangerous behaviour first, psychoanalyse them later.

There are less obvious examples; the documentary The Corporation has pointed out that corporations behave like sociopaths; they have no social conscience. Their CEOs are responsible for and profit greatly from this behaviour, so I think it is fair to call them antisocial to such an extent that they are a danger to the rest of us.

In fact, I think it is a fair argument to say that most people who seek power are not like you and me. Power comes not only through politics, but also through climbing the corporate ladder, accumulating vast wealth, aligning yourself with powerful people, or murdering others. People who lust for power operate from a predator morality, in which might makes right. In practice, this means that whatever they can get away with is morally acceptable.

Most people concerned about climate change or social justice simply reject this. They want to believe that these people, who are doing clearly immoral acts, can be reasoned with, that their innate humanity can be appealed to. This is delusional. These people are ignoring the psychopath’s behaviour and projecting their own values upon him.

The same thing occurs in reverse. The neocons and lunatic right are famous for projecting their values on the rest of us. Because they lie, they assume we must, too. Because they seek power, we must be, too. In fact, they see life as a battle for supremacy, and they don’t intend to lose. That is why they see global warming as a “socialist scheme“, an attempt to impose world government – an attempt to do what they are trying to do, which is establish a New World Order with them on top.

Because they see life as a struggle for power, they care for their children in ways that reflect this. They try to make lots of money and attain high-status positions, and encourage their children to do the same. They also don’t want the rest of us following that path because it means more competition, so that’s why school funding gets cut, welfare gets cut, and so on.

And the reason they do not care about climate change is because it contradicts their base value system in many ways. They are not interested in cooperation, which they see as weakness. To power-seekers, there is a clear hierarchy based on power, and one’s power is based on one’s political, economic, or military might. Cooperation, on the other hand, is a group of more-or-less equals working toward a common purpose. No power-seeker is going to do this for someone lower in the food chain.

I believe the differences in behaviour and morality are explained by how we seek security. Security is the greatest human need: None of us wants to die; we all want to live well for as long as possible. That is only possible with security of food and person, freedom from health issues, and so on. Some of these we can do more about that others.

Serial killers are, in their twisted way, seeking some control over their life by destroying others. Power-seekers look for security by dominating others – and this is a time-proven method of achieving security. You will live longer and better if you’re the top dog. Cooperators create security through stable communities, fair laws, and so on.

Attempts to appeal to the humanity of a high-level denier are a waste of time that we do not have. People who seek security through power…believe that security is obtained through achieving power, through being the Alpha wolf. When someone they see as a sheep attempts to persuade them of the joys of cooperation and being a good citizen, they do what wolves do with sheep.

There is a campaign right now in my province of BC to ensure that the new Harmonised Sales Tax (HST) does not apply to bicycles. The HST is replacing the federal and provincial sales taxes, and bicycles, apparently, are currently exempt from Provincial Sales Tax (PST) but will not be under the HST. One of the two major parties in BC is running a campaign to gain an exemption for bicycles from the HST.

And this, it seems to me, is at the heart of the NDP’s loss of moral authority. The federal NDP party is no better, having not long ago campaigned hard against bank fees. Both the federal and provincial NDP parties claim to ‘get’ the danger of climate change, and frequently complain bitterly that the Green Party is taking voters from them.

But…they clearly don’t ‘get’ it.

I understand that we want to encourage more people to ride bikes. It’s good for their health, it reduces traffic congestion, and it cuts greenhouse gas emissions. And of course nobody except banks likes bank fees.

But rather than fighting for a special exemption of a few percent for bicycles, why not fight against the subsidies to fossil-fueled vehicles? If you’re serious about climate change, if you’re serious about improving health through reducing pollution, and if you don’t think we should be subsidising fossil industries, you should be working for streetcars, and building codes for shopping malls that allow electric buses to drop passengers inside the mall, instead of across the parking lot, and pedestrian and bike-friendly neighbourhoods.

If the HST adds a few percent to the cost of a bike – that should be no big deal for most people. And bike riders use roads, too, do they not? Are those not paid for with taxes?

If you’re concerned about social justice, then you should be fighting to ensure that bicycles are not such a major expense that paying a few percent more discourages it.

They are also standing in the way of going green, which isn’t helping their credibility. I ran against Lana Popham in my riding. Lana was the NDP candidate, I was the Green Party candidate. I had a chance to talk with her a bit during the campaign, and Lana does seem to ‘get’ the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

I even considered withdrawing as a candidate and endorsing her – if she would cross the floor and become a Green MLA if and when her own party didn’t follow-through on various green promises. I didn’t do it; the Green Party leader persuaded me not to, believing it would be utterly misinterpreted by the media and public, and she was probably right.

Regardless, the outcome is that a small-g green NDPer was elected…and that did nothing to green the NDP or raise awareness of the danger of climate change. The opposite has happened. The NDP has Lana fighting to keep bicycles a few dollars cheaper in an attempt to woo the cycling crowd, rather than proposing realistic solutions to deeper problems, like why we have to give people a discount of a few percent before they can or will buy a bicycle. Or talking about the fact that climate change will wipe us off the planet, regardless of the final cost of bicycles.

The same problem applies nationally – look at the time the federal NDP spend making a lot of noise about bank fees. OK, nobody likes paying bank fees, but if you can’t take it any more the credit unions will be delighted to have you. And ultimately, when you claim we’re facing ruin due to climate change, devoting your party to fight bank fees utterly trivialises this claim, doesn’t it?

With the federal Conservatives and Liberals at high levels of unpopularity and in the middle of a bankster-induced recession, the NDP (and the Greens, but that’s another matter) should be shooting up in the polls, but they’re stuck at <15%. There’s a good reason for that: The NDP has whittled away at their own credibility and their moral authority until they’ve become just another political party.

They have no vision, and as a result they chase bank fees rather focusing on actual crises. They pander to cyclists by looking to save a few percent on the cost of a bike. Why was the NDP in favour of bailing out the American auto companies? It wasn’t to save the jobs, it was to save the unions. The jobs could have been saved by putting those workers to work building electric streetcars and windmills. That would also have helped with carbon emissions and greening the economy.

I am no longer affiliated with any political party, and I can’t imagine what would induce me to run again, but I will say this: If you want a green economy, you’re not going to get it by voting NDP. They claim to ‘get it,’ but their actions speak volumes otherwise. And they continue to waste good candidates like Lana Popham in trivial causes when we face real crises.

Climate change is not a clear and present danger. It is clear to scientists, to those who take the trouble to understand the science, and to those who trust the former or the latter. It is not at all clear to anyone else, and of course the truth and danger are deliberately obscured by paid deniers.

Climate change is also not a present danger, meaning it is not an immediate threat. The longer we put off confronting climate change, the more damage it will do, but the nature of the threat is creeping and exponential. Some changes are occurring right now and many may realise that climate change is a contributory factor, but the danger is distant and remote. Later, as we go up the exponential damage curve, climate change becomes a clear and present danger but it will be too late to stop the worst.

Humanity does face a clear and present danger, however, and combating this crisis will go a long way toward fighting climate change. Environmentalists must not waste this crisis. Despite forty years of environmental activism and some major battles won, the war is all but lost.

If you want to win, it is time to change strategy. The crisis is peak oil, and is dead simple:

1. There is only so much oil;
2. At some point, the peak, we will have used half of all the oil;
3. After that point, there will only be less oil; and
4. Our entire civilisation, especially transportation and food, is dependent upon oil.
5. No substitutes are anywhere near available.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that unless our need for oil remains less than the supply of oil, the price of oil is going to go up. Way up, given how dependent we are upon it.

From The Oil Drum

After the price of oil spikes, there will be a recession, and the price may come back down. That has been the pattern in recent recessions caused by oil price increases. This time, however, we have passed peak oil and that means the supply is less than it way – which means the price is not going to go down as much as it used to.

We are in a permanent recession as a result of the fact that oil prices are roughly four times what they were a few years ago. Because virtually 100% of our transportation – trucks, trains, planes, ships, and of course cars – runs on oil or its derivatives, the price of transportation has increased. The same effect exists with food, where pesticides are petroleum based, and of course tractors run on diesel. Inflation lately has been driven by these increases in transportation and food costs, and as people have to spend more on necessities like food and transportation, they will have less to spend on other things. This means less consumer demand and therefore a recession.

This recession is permanent and will probably deepen. Just prior to the recession, the price of oil spiked to $147 per barrel, and it is now approximately $80 per barrel. This is four times the price of only a few years ago, when the economy was booming. We are now in the worst recession since the Great Depression. The price of oil is not going down.

How does this recession fit into environmentalism? It is a crisis that will continue until we greatly reduce our demand for oil. Which, coincidentally and interestingly, is also a big part of the cure for climate change.

Climate change warriors need to get behind a plan to get off oil. The peak oil crisis is now, and people will respond. Whether they respond by invading another oil-bearing country, by dissolving into poverty and despair, or by conserving and moving to renewable energy is currently an open question.

Environmentalists, climate warriors, peak oilers, nationalists, and democratic reformers need to pile onto peak oil. The longer we delay, the more damage we suffer from recession, from peak oil, and from climate change. Replacing oil with conservation and renewables makes the nation energy-independent, creates a secure food supply, eliminates oil-induced inflation and recessions, and slashes greenhouse gas emissions.

Peak oil is a clear and present danger to the nation, to our prosperity, and to civilisation, and the protective steps for peak oil will greatly help with climate change. All of us need to join together to combat it.

I don’t mean the Paris Hiltons of the world, but her daddy and his cronies – the CEOs, executives, and politicians – the rich and powerful. These people are the modern aristocracy. They have the most to gain in the short-term from the status quo, from maintaining that the current course is the ideal, and by claiming that only their compass is capable of pointing True North. Further, they have the money and connections to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions, up to a point. They are thus strongly motivated to believe what they want to believe and to ignore reality.

The common man is not so isolated from consequences and has less motivation to believe that the rich know best, so those at the top must employ ‘think tanks’ to tell the little people what to think. Not surprisingly, what think tanks spout frequently coincides with what the rich want everyone to think.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the famous economist, noted the tendency of executives to be most psychologically committed to the rightness of the corporate vision – they have to be in order to attain their position. For example, if you accept that human-caused climate change is a problem, you’re very unlikely to become Chief Executive Officer of an oil or coal or auto company. The opposite is true:

• Example #1: Bob Lutz is the product development chief and Vice Chairman at General Motors. Mr. Lutz recently called global warming a “total crock of sh*t,” but then went on to claim that his views had no bearing on GM’s commitment to build environmentally friendly vehicles. Uh huh.
• Example #2: Rex Tillerson is the CEO of ExxonMobil. Mr. Tillerson argues that “the science of climate change is far from settled and that his company views it as its “corporate social responsibility” to continue to supply the world with fossil fuels.” Fuels that, according to scientists, are destroying the world. Interesting view of “social responsibility.”
• Example #3: Don Blankenship is the CEO of Massey Energy, a coal company engaged in mountaintop removal mining and violator of the Clean Water Act no fewer than 12,000 times. Mr. Blankenship recently tweeted that “Some fear that we are entering a new Ice Age. We must demand that more coal be burned to save the Earth from global cooling.”

Presumably these executives do listen to their own scientists when it comes to issues like engine designs, efficacy of oil extraction rates, and so on. They are not opposed to science in general, simply to science that reveals that their business model is flawed, or that their prestige, power, and money results from doing harmful things. They have a psychological blind spot – a fatal flaw.

The idiocy of the modern aristocracy is not immediately fatal for those at the top. You may have noticed that they are not suffering much, so may question just how dangerous it is to be stupid and rich. The sad reality is that their flaw is fatal for us. In a prime example of this dangerously gross idiocy:

• Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency and formerly an OPEC employee, admits that their projections of remaining oil supply are based on wishful thinking. The IEA, which every government in the world relies upon for oil forecasts, had never actually measured how much oil remained until 2008.

The fantastic stupidity of this is mind-boggling to average people. Perhaps if one is paid hundreds of thousands per year, jets around the world on a plush expense account, and looks good in a $1,000 suit, one can find a way to make sense of the senseless. That Mr. Birol gets all this while being so incredibly dumb is a sure sign that idiocracy has arrived in the aristocracy. That Mr. Birol has multiple degrees means nothing; very intelligent people frequently do very stupid things. Because oil is so vital to our civilisation, Mr. Birol’s foolishness is going to cost us very dearly. Heck of a job, Birol.

And that is the true tragedy of allowing morans at the top. They are leading us all to destruction.