Transcribed by Brian Magee
Jason Bradford: Great to have you again. I know you've been super busy. It's been a really busy time for what you do, the co-editor of Energy Bulletin, an on-line source for news and commentary related to energy, society, and the environment. And, Bart, you're a trained journalist now specializing in media coverage and the cultural response to peak oil and global warming. And we're going to have a news roundup again like we did the last time--there is just so much happening--we didn't get through half of what we wanted to talk about. So, thanks for being back, Bart.
Bart Anderson: I'm glad to be here, and, one of the problems is that since we've talked some big things have happened. So...
JB: Yeah, yeah. Things are really happening fast right now and it's hard to keep up. I'm sure that's true for you, especially sitting in the editor position of Energy Bulletin. How's that site doing?
BA: One of the interesting things is as of two weeks ago when oil prices started moving up, our readership numbers have increased by about 40%. So its very dramatic when you look at the graph.
JB: Yeah. Well, we'll get to some update on the oil situation. But I wanted to make sure that we did cover some news happening with respect to climate change. There was a lot happening in the last month with that. Anything you want to bring up?
BA: Well, I think we were talking about some news in the estimates about the effects of climate change. There's something you mentioned about a New Scientist article?
JB: Yeah. What was interesting was New Scientist, which is a British publication, sort of like a Scientific American, so it's a popular scientist magazine but has a lot of credible scientists. It's written by scientists, typically, as well has science reporters. And it was interesting. There's this research coming out by Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, Canada. And what was he was doing was, he was basically modeling the emissions levels and comparing that to public policy. And he said that, quote, "They modeled the reduction of industrial emissions below 2006 levels by between 20% and 100% by 2050. Only when emissions were entirely eliminated did the temperature increase remain below 2 degrees Celsius." So that 2 degrees Celsius was an important number. It was sort of set as, if we go above 2 degrees Celsius there's sort of this sort of threshold where so many catastrophic things happen that the policy was, make sure we don't go above 2 degrees Celsius.
BA: And, of course, 2 degrees Celsius is, what, almost 4 degrees Fahrenheit?
JB: Yes.
BA: And, so, I mean, what would happen if we went above that?
JB: Well, no one's for sure, but what they start getting in to is it starts to run away from us, in a sense, the emissions that we do no longer modulate the temperature. We start having things like melting permafrost, release of methane, and then you have a rapid up spike in emissions beyond what we are doing. So...
BA: Did you ever see "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"?
JB: No, I haven't.
BA: Where Mickey Mouse...
JB: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
BA: ...learns how to get the mop and the water to start... bringing in water and it just goes out of control. That's the image I have. It's, I guess in layman's terms, above 2 degrees centigrade we don't know what happens but we suspect that processes, global processes, that are going out of control, that we will not like at all.
JB: Right, right. Now what he contrasted this with was, quote, "The European Union nations have agreed to limit their emissions to 20% below 1990 levels by 2020 and support dropping global emissions to 50% below 1990 levels by 2050." So, you compare what they've, what the European Union have said they'd do, which they're some of the more progressive with respect to this, and we have this bizarre situation where governments agree to not exceed 2 degrees Celsius--that's their policy--and, yet, they make emissions policies that lead to exceeding that threshold. So it's really a bizarre situation where the rhetoric does not add up at all.
BA: Well, and this disconnect you're talking to, but about what seems to be the scientific reality and the planning...
JB: Yeah.
BA: ...OK. You're talking about probably the best climate policy so far in the world, right now.
JB: Yeah.
BA: The United States, China, and India are far behind that.
JB: Yeah.
BA: So, we're sort of at a double-remove from what we really need to do?
JB: Yeah. Then, what, what's even tougher than listening to that was, it looks like that 2 degrees Celsius policy that has been agreed upon is not even enough. There was this report that came out by this organization call Carbon Equity. Did you see that?
BA: Yes, I did.
JB: It was titled "The Big Melt," and I think they used the headline "The Big Melt" to highlight the loss of arctic ice this summer, which was unprecedented. And, they summarize, though, much more than the loss of arctic ice and Greenland ice. They summarize what's happening in terms of the climate system, even with the warming we've had so far. That was really distressing to me. I know a lot of people who read that were just blown away by it.
BA: We posted several people who were very depressed by these findings. I mean, we're nowhere near the 2 degree centigrade rise right now, and this looks like major, major meltdown.
JB: Yeah. So, it was very amazing that what's going on right now, is you see a lot of interest. Apparently, there was a football game on NBC--a National Football League game--where the halftime show was like the green halftime. They had a reporter in the arctic, and...did you see that at all?
BA: No, I didn't.
JB: I had somebody who was visiting their family, and said it was a green halftime and explaining what was going on. So, you had the football commentators talking to some guy in the arctic talking about how it's melting.
BA: So, you know, you've read these grim articles; you're a scientist. How does it make you feel? What's your reaction? Was this a surprise to you?
JB: Well, what was a surprise to me a little bit is, is how fast it's all happening because I've been frustrated with the political process and the scientific process, in a sense, where the scientists generally are very cautious and they say things... they always talk about at the end of their papers, "this is how we could be wrong about this" or "this is what needs further research." Each scientific paper in itself is a little piece of the whole picture. But what's interesting is that people tend to grab on to those doubts at the end of these papers. But what I found frustrating was that if you look at the breadth of the scientific research it's just one case after another where it's all pointing in the same direction, with minor caveats at the end. But, looking at it in totality things were much, much worse than anybody was really discussing. That's what was so frustrating: that there was very few people who could look at it in its totality and step back, except for the IPCC, which is supposed to be summary reports. But what's interesting is that the IPCC also works in a political context. They're primarily scientists--1,500 scientists--but at the end of their report, in their reviews, the politicians come in and basically have to edit a lot of this work. And there's these battles, these epic battles, that go on between the scientists and the politicians each time these reports come out. So, they seem to be really watered down every time. And, that was really frustrating.
BA: What's nice about these articles is they seem to be saying that the IPCC and so forth are probably wrong, but they're saying it from the other direction, that they're much too conservative in their estimates of these facts.
JB: Yeah, that's what I always felt. So, that's what was very frustrating to me, was even this organization , primarily of scientists, was unable because of these political pressures to really come out and say what was going on. And the reason why this has happened is because the climate models represent, extremely accurately, sort of the fast feedbacks--the sun rises every day and it heats the earth and the planet and it sets and that leads to a whole set of dynamics; and then there's the tilt of the earth for the seasons; and the location of the ocean versus the continents--and it can model those things on a scale of time that we're familiar with, in terms of weather. The problem comes when these models try to incorporate the slow things that happen: the loss of ice over time, the change of the vegetation as it acclimates or tries to migrate.
BA: What time scale are we talking?
JB: We're talking about decades to hundreds of years. That doesn't get modeled by the climate models. So these lags, these feedback lags, are what is missing right now in the climate models.
BA: But are seeing some of those right now. I mean, is that what "Big Melt" was saying?
JB: Yes. "Big Melt," basically, is saying that we're seeing some of the stuff that the climate models we're worried about happening saying, "okay, if we hit 2 degrees Celsius we'll start losing the ice pack." Well, sorry, we're losing the ice packs at half a degree Celsius. So, the climate models didn't capture this; they didn't know how to capture this.
BA: Now, one of the things I think that's interesting is that these are very powerful arguments, but I would bet that they really don't resonate too much with an average citizen.
JB: Yeah.
BA: But, one of the things that's happening is that global warning seems to be taking the stage now in a couple of ways. Of course, in California, we're very aware of the fires.
JB: Yeah.
BA: And there's an article...it was actually a very good article from CBS News by Scott Pelley who talked to some experts...and, one of the... I believe he was an ecologist, fire ecologist, looking at fires in the west... and he found out that, in fact, we're getting some effects already?
JB: Oh, yeah, definitely. This has been studied for the last few years, at least. There have been research papers coming out looking at fire frequency, especially in the western U.S., and have noticed that it's really on an upswing. And I guess the CBS News pulled out that information and interviewed the experts, so...
BA: One of the figures that impressed me was that the fire season, I guess in the western United States, it's more than two months longer that it used to be, say 15 years ago.
JB: Wow.
BA: And what this means is that the forests, the plants, and so forth, they dry out faster, they warm up sooner and so you've got fires that are several... I mean the average fire is, what, two or three times more intense that it used to be.
JB: Yeah.
BA: So, this is something that really hits us and we can see that it's not just theoretical.
JB: Yeah. And, then in California there's been a lot of talk about the snow pack, and water is a huge issue in the state, of course, so, that also, the modeling of that seems to indicate we have less water available for most of the state.
BA: Is there anything up there in Willits where you can see the effects of global warming?
JB: Well, there's not been a lot of studies about this in particular areas like Willits. I try to ask old-timers once in a while. They will say, "Well, we used to have harsher winters," things like that.
BA: So hard to tell.
JB: Yeah.
BA: Another way that it's hitting people is in the droughts.
JB: Yeah.
BA: We're used to droughts out here in California and we're used to sometimes the restaurants not giving water, not being able to water your lawns. But, apparently what's new now is the southeast has been hit. And, there's apparently tension between the different states about who's going to get the water.
JB: Yeah, Georgia versus Florida, sort of stuff.
BA: A town in Tennessee has run out of water already.
JB: Wow.
BA: So, there was a remark, was it the New Mexico governor?... was looking at the Great Lakes with great desire, saying that there's all that wonderful water.
JB: Oh, interesting. So, a big pipeline project, or something.
BA: So, it's funny. I guess in the great scheme of things these aren't as important and the Greenland ice melting, but I think we will notice it more, and hopefully that'll translate into some political action.
JB: Yeah. It has to come home for people, almost, it seems like. It has to hit them in their daily lives where they live, or it's so disconnected, and they can't see how it will impact them 10, 20 years from now.
BA: What we've been talking about so far is grim, but may be manageable. Way out in the margins is James Lovelock, and maybe you could tell who he is and why he's so important.
JB: Well, James Lovelock is a very interesting character. He's one of these scientists who has been doing science on his own; he basically works out of his own home, and really hasn't had much of an affiliation with any institution. And perhaps because of that he's come out with some very interesting studies in his life. He basically came up with the hypothesis that was eventually called the Gaia Hypothesis that looked at the earth as a self-regulating system; that the biology of the planet is involved in keeping temperatures stable, and those sort of things. So, that has become what is now called Earth System Science. It's the basis for what we have now as climatology, for example. And, the climatologists now have to work with the biologists to understand how the vegetation change leads to the precipitation change, leads to temperature change which leads back on to vegetation, and then runoff of water seeds the ocean with minerals that then leads to blooms of life. So all this is... can stem from, sort of, James Lovelock putting the pieces together. But he's been, like I say, outside of the halls of science for a lot, but has gained a lot of respect. He had a book called The Revenge of Gaia that came out a couple years ago, I think, or a year ago, and then he was recently interviewed in Rolling Stone about it. And, so, he's extremely grim about things. He thinks that the climate system is running away from us.
BA: Well, one thing that strikes me about his is that even though he introduced the Gaia Hypothesis, he's definitely not a New Ager.
JB: No, no.
BA: He, in fact, he's got a lot of hard science inventions and discoveries credited to him.
JB: Yeah. He invented this device that can detect minute quantities of things in the air, so... machines that go in and say, yeah, there's this many parts per billion of this toxin, here, and you can... they're used in all kinds of research to study if there's been an industrial spill or what's happening to ozone on the ground or...
BA: Well, apparently there's a quote that somebody pours out a certain chemical in Japan, a week later he can pick it up in London.
JB: Yeah. And he was key then to figuring out that the ozone hole was happening. So, it's a really tough message to hear. He has a quote: "Some people will sit in their seats and do nothing, frozen in panic. Others will move. They'll see what's about to happen and they'll take action and they'll survive. They're the carriers of the civilization ahead."
BA: Well, I read the article, and I would say that if it weren't James Lovelock he would be totally dismissed. He's, he's... It's pretty extreme what he's predicting.
JB: Yeah. So that's at Rolling Stone. I was looking at Richard Heinberg's latest newsletter. And he's done, again, an amazing job of summarizing what's been going on science-wise with respect to both climate change and energy, energy scarcity. So, I highly recommend that. Have you had a lot of feedback on that article?
BA: Heinberg is usually, I don't know, a couple of months ahead of most other people. So, some other people are picking him up and reading him. He's particularly good at looking at the interactions between climate change, peak oil, and the politics.
JB: Yeah.
BA: He and other people are increasingly starting to talk about political responses, and I think this is different. I think before we were talking about what would happen when peak oil would hit, what would happen with 2 degrees centigrade of climate change, and maybe eco-villages.
JB: Yeah.
BA: But in terms of, like, what action we could do practically as countries or as communities there wasn't much discussion. But he's going in that direction, do you think?
JB: Yeah, yeah. He's really started to do that. He had Powerdown, where he talked about the different ways societies might deal with this--are they just going to go for warfare? Are they going to working it out politically? Oil Depletion Protocol was the next book he had, which dealt specifically with how to manage decline in oil without going to war over it. And this latest newsletter really pulls together his latest thoughts on this, so really, really amazing, I think, summary of the situation right now.
BA: One of the things that struck me was there's a conflict right now between the heavy industrial countries... current, the West, and, say, China and India. And it's all about coal.
JB: Yeah.
BA: And there aren't too many new sources of energy that are cheap; coal is one of them. But, if China, if India, really goes to coal, that's about it for global warming.
JB: Yeah. Yeah.
BA: And, so, as I understand it it's like a blackmail weapon which will be suicidal if it's used. But I think the idea is that there will be continuing tension about that.
JB: But it's similar, in some respect to the Cold War, in a sense, where we will bury you in mutually assured destruction, and...
BA: Except this is a coal war...
JB: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Pretty fascinating that countries are willing to that, but it's very... Yeah, geopolitics gets pretty scary.
BA: One of the good things about coverage is there's more and better coverage of China. China's really interesting. It's, according to Representative Bartlett, the peak oil fellow from Maryland, he thinks that China's leadership is aware of peak oil, and they're not unaware of climate change, it's just that with the needs for economic progress and political stability, they're really having to juggle all these things. So, it's not a simple problem.
JB: No. It's amazing how many times you have economic articles from economists basically saying, "China is ruining this" and "China is messing this up," and then you realize how many of these industrial missions we've created in the U.S. and Europe in the past hundred years, and China is just a drop so far, historically speaking, even though they've overtaken us currently.
BA: Exactly. And, of course, it was England that started it all with the industrial revolution and coal and so forth.
JB: Yeah. So you're listening to KZYX Philo, KZYZ Willits and Ukiah. This is The Reality Report. I'm your host, Jason Bradford, and today we have a guest, Bart Anderson, a co-editor of Energy Bulletin, an on-line source for news and commentary related to energy, society, and the environment. You can see more at www.energybulletin.net. So, the U.S. economy has been getting a lot of news lately. And, it's important not just for citizens of the U.S. but we're really... The U.S. economy has been looked at worldwide as sort of the stable place where you can invest and get a return on that investment and our currency was a reserve currency, so, what happens to our economy actually has implications all over the world.
BA: And there are connections, of course, with energy and climate. For example, the price of oil is, for us in the United States, is very dependent on the value of the dollar.
JB: Right. So, what's interesting there was... the dollar's declining pretty dramatically, and, so, our price of oil is going up, whereas it's actually fairly stable in the last year or so in other parts of the world.
BA: Yeah.
JB: And, so, they can maintain their consumption while we may have some consumption decline if prices really bite. So, that's going to be interesting to see what happens over the next year, I think, with that.
BA: And another interaction is that, of course, most of the oil traded is done in, traded in, petrodollars
JB: Yeah.
BA: Dollars that are eventually going to the U.S. economy, and this is the solution to the oil embargo, oil shocks during the '70s that's worked out. And it's worked, I guess, pretty well in the decades since, and much to the advantage to the United States. However, as we've been finding, the dollar's going down in value, so countries are not so interested in holding dollars. And one of the things that we constantly hear about is that maybe this country or that country may be going away from dollars, perhaps to euros.
JB: And, that itself, causes, then, a move away from dollars from other countries. So, it's just, sort of, a thing where talk about going away from dollars leads to countries going away from dollars. Just, it becomes a psychological game, it seems like.
BA: One of the most popular articles we've had is about an Iranian bourse, where oil would be traded not in dollars, in something else. And, it turns out there's a lot less to the story than, really is a..., than it would seem. That this bourse idea was floated by somebody and it's not... hasn't really gone very far, maybe it's going somewhere, but it continues to get a lot of hits. So people know that it's important and are concerned about it.
JB: Right. Well, there was this summary by Garrett Johnson at Bits of News--I've never heard of that site before, but--he had an interesting summary about all the diversifying, all the diversification away from the dollar. And we have "United Arab Emirates central banks diversifies away from dollar", "the Kuwait unhooks the currency pegged to the dollar", "Syria unhooks currency pegged to the dollar", and "Saudi Arabia refuses to cut interest rates with the Federal Reserve", "Iran starts selling oil in euros", and "the Venezuela currency peg is in danger" and "plans to sell oil priced in euros". So, a whole lot of, kind of, players lining up. And then there was that Chinese official, he had a quote just last week I think, and it got a lot of press... he said something about diversifying away from U.S. currency, and then the stock market dropped. It was, like, they always say at the end of the day, "the Dow declined because...", and part of that mix was "well, a Chinese official said that they'd diversify away from the dollar," and so then the Dow dropped.
BA: Well, and a couple of weeks before that a Chinese official says "we're not diversifying away from the dollar." But even that reassurance makes one nervous.
JB: Right. Right, right. Exactly. So, it's interesting to think about how we got into this mess with respect to also the housing bubble. There's a fear right now out there of poor market liquidity; people are worried that we maybe can't trust the mortgage-backed securities that these banks are holding--is this bank going to stay in business?--so banks are looking at each other just like banks are looking at holders of mortgages that they've loaned to. So...
BA: Maybe could you back up a little bit? I don't follow this as closely as I do other things, so how is this related to the sub-prime housing bubble?
JB: So, basically, several years ago the U.S. economy was in a recession, or nearly so, after September 11th and Greenspan dropped the interest rates down to almost nothing. It become so cheap to buy money, or to receive money. Banks basically have to buy money from each other. If they make too much of a loan, they lost their cash reserves, they've got to grab some cash reserves from another bank. That's the overnight lending rate to banks. The Fed is what sets that rate. If they set that rate really low then banks have very little risk to loaning out a lot of money because they can always get money from other banks cheaply, and the Federal Reserve is the bank of last resort in this. So, the Federal Reserve basically said, "banks, go ahead; lend out money like crazy." So, there was a drop in the standards by which banks loan to people for mortgages. And, aside from that, there's this whole set of securities developed called mortgage-backed securities, where the banks would no longer hold on to the mortgage, they would package mortgages and sell them to somebody else who would then hold them. So I found this when buying homes lately, is that I get a loan from a major bank and they would say, "Oh, by the way, we're probably not going to hold this. You're going to get a letter coming up soon from some other organization/institution saying 'we actually have your loan now.'"
BA: We went through that. In fact, that happened to us three or four different times for the same mortgage.
JB: Yes. So those are these packaged mortgages that then get sold. Well, the institutions that hold these then say, "Hey, look. Look at how much we have. We own all these mortgage-backed securities and look at how the property values are going up." So, they then said, "We can leverage these to buy other things." So what you had was this house of cards set up where loans were being given to people who probably were going to have a hard time paying them back, especially with these adjustable rates, and the rates would go up.
BA: So sub-prime means that it's not your best investment risk.
JB: Right. They were loaning people with no money down who had a job, that they were young in the job market, they had a job that maybe wasn't that secure, they could afford it now, unless they got a raise, in five years they'd have trouble because the rates would go up. Now, that high-risk loan then got packaged into these securities; they then got leveraged for other things. So, that then what you have now is you have defaults are happening on these mortgages. Banks are looking not just at the people defaulting, but they're looking at other banks and saying, "Are they holding a bunch of this bad money?" and "Are they going to be able to pay me back on this other thing that they bought with the backing of their credit for that... from the mortgage securities?" So, it's just like if you have a credit card you say, "I can afford to spend wildly on my credit card because I've got this house that is worth so much and I can always take out a second mortgage and pay off my credit card." So, banks were doing this, as well. They were doing that kind of looking at the value of real estate, which is not highly liquid, and...
BA: And, of course, it makes sense because if you can do that you can make great profits--for a while.
JB: Yeah. Yeah. You can do it for a while, as long as you're on the upswing, as long as you're following the bubble up you're okay. And you're going to get rewarded. You're going to get high commissions. What he have now, though, is that these bubbles always burst and the Federal Reserve saw that, "okay, we may be in an inflationary period, so, the inflation rate's going up. What do you do in an inflationary period? You make credit harder to get." So, if people don't have as much money to spend then there is less demand on goods and services so the price may moderate a little bit. So that's why the interest rates started going up. And, well, but the bubble started falling apart, started bursting. What do you want to do in that situation? You want to lower interest rates a little bit to take the pressure off of these banks and these borrowers. But what does that do? That stokes inflation again.
BA: And another problem is that, if we have low interest rates in the United States, what that means is that, well, that's not so appealing to people who want to invest their money in bonds.
JB: Right, U.S. treasuries.
BA: And so instead of investing in U.S. treasuries, and basically supporting the U.S. debt, they'll go elsewhere.
JB: Right, right. Hence, the Chinese official.
BA: Right, and the net result is falling value of the dollar.
JB: So inflation is going to go up even without, let's say, interest rates rising from the Fed simply because we have a drop in currency and we import so much. And we have to raise interest rates on bonds and treasuries in order to attract these foreign investors. So, it's this vicious cycle we're in right now.
BA: How do you keep all these things in your mind? Peak oil, global warming, and now the sub-prime housing bubble.
JB: Gosh, yeah, it's difficult. It's a part-time job, of course. I have to get ready for interviews with you. That's how I do it. So, I'd like to open up the phones, see if there's any callers. We have a few other things to talk about. We can pop those in as the callers come on the line. So, hi, caller. You're on the air.
Caller: Good morning, it's professor Pingpong
JB: Hello.
Caller: Free man of the air.
JB: Yes.
Caller: I would like to clarify something for you all, and the listeners. There are actually two systems in existence, side-by-side, in this country of ours. And the one that is corporate is called Admiralty Law. That's what they practice in the courts and all of their administrative functions, is designated by the gold braid on the flag in courtroom and all the official buildings. Now, that Admiralty Law is a law of contracts and that's why there are contracts for doing everything. And the people, the corporations that engage in commerce and other things they have contracts to show what they're doing and be taxed appropriately, etc., like by the IRS, and they use the "funny money," the Federal Reserve notes. Now, there's another system which is called the Common Law and the People of the Land... because Admiralty jurisdiction is basically on the sea or where the United States of America, "Inc." has jurisdiction, which is Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam. The states are sovereign, the citizens of the states are sovereign, are protected by the Constitution of the United States and the constitution of the state. Now, how do these free people of "the land" become entrapped in the corporate scheme, in Admiralty jurisdiction? They get entrapped by those agencies--corporations--capitalizing the legal name of every individual. That's at the time that you're issued your birth certificate or other identification, naturalization, citizenship--that becomes property of the Department of Commerce and you are looked upon as a corporate entity from that point on, and subject to all the corporate laws. And, as long as you are you have to operate like a corporation. You have to be out there to make profit, you have to have your legal team to protect you. But as a common citizen, a free man or free woman on "the land," you have your constitutional protection and your rights to travel without having a driver's license, not to be taxed for things that are not delineated in the constitution, which the income tax is not, and to have real valuable money, not this paper stuff that's dropping in value, has always been inflationary, has always been a phony thing, and the debt for the issuance of all that paper money is on the shoulders of all of those fictitious corporate entities that they have made out of our real names, by capitalizing all of our names, and then that's why we're taxed, that's why the bankruptcy that this country is in is being put on the shoulders of the free men and free women of "this land," of each state, but the free men and the free women of "the land" don't understand how to fight this tyranny.
JB: Alright.
Caller: We don't individually learn how to fight the tyranny of the Administrative Law and their system; demonstrating and calling on our representatives is not going to get it.
JB: Okay, we'll take that comment. That's very interesting. Thank you.
BA: We have had in the sustainability, peak oil movement, there are a number of people that are talking, not exactly in the same terms as the caller, but they are looking to things like local currencies, suspiciousness of the federal United States currency...
JB: Yeah. "Get out of debt" is a huge theme. You're in debt and you're connected to this, you're beholden to them.
BA: So, I'm not sure I'd go along with the caller, but there are a lot of people that are saying similar things and I think there actually are some probably good things that'll come out of that.
JB: Well, what's interesting to me is the whole notion of freedom right now in America. It's very hard to have freedom in a situation where you are in debt. It's hard to have freedom when you have property and that property is adjacent to neighbors and to common use, then you can't just do anything with it. So, freedom itself is sort of a tricky term in a situation where you're living where there is high population density, when you have people downstream from you, even. So, I always take freedom with a grain of salt because we have, in a sense, a lot of responsibility to others--other species, other individual people--and in order to get along we have to temper our freedom with some sort of sense of belonging. And, so, but, yeah, I do agree quite a bit that we are certainly beholden to these corporate powers when we owe them a lot of money. And, basically, if we don't have self-reliance to some respect, either... even as local communities, then there's no way. And if most of our tax money is going to the federal level and then we have to scramble to get it back towards the local level, then, of course, there's not a lot of freedom there.
BA: I know a lot is going on up in Willits. Is there any talk of a local currency or anything like that?
JB: It happens once in a while. But the number of activists involved are few relative to the needs of things to get involved in, and there's been nobody that's been super passionate about local currencies here yet.
BA: From what I understand from people involved, that it's a lot more involved than it seems at first.
JB: Yeah. Yeah, it's really tough to manage a currency. Alright, we have another caller. High, there. You're on the air.
Caller: Yes. Back to another subject which was the global warming subject. I saw a movie a long time ago that was put together by some European scientists and some U.S. scientists that said basically, and I'm not sure if you really touched on this, that global warming is really a precursor to ice ages, in that once the storms reach a certain level then the earth's crust becomes unstable and you get volcanic activity which eventually blocks the sun. And I was kind of amazed when I first saw the video. And what they suggested was re-mineralizing the earth because the trees were actually using up the minerals in the earth which cause them to die and termites kick in putting out tons of methane that adds to our industrial waste and hastens the process.
JB: Okay.
Caller: But, anyway.
JB: Yeah, I can comment on those.
Caller: The other thing that is more local that is a concern is PG&E has leased ocean land or ocean.... it's kind of like the land in the ocean off of Fort Bragg for wave energy.
JB: Right.
Caller: And I was wondering if you had more information about that. It seems like a good idea on some level, but on a local level it does have problems.
JB: Okay, thank you so much for your call.
Caller: Okay.
JB: So, she made a connection, maybe, between increasing storms and ice ages through volcanic activity. I have not heard of a connection between storms and volcanic activity. It is true that volcanoes can spew aerosols into the planet, which has a cooling effect, and actually if you research a topic called "global dimming" you'll see how that process occurs even today with industrial emissions, especially with coal and airlines. So, they produce a cooling effect right now. Now, most of the ice age cycles are driven by what are called the Milankovitch cycles, which have to do with the tilting of the earth; the earth is not always tilted at the same degree it is right now. And, also, with the orbit of the earth around the sun. The earth can have a more circular orbit around the sun or it can get more elliptical, and where it is in that ellipse relative to the northern or southern hemisphere tilt in the winter or summer has an impact on how hot or cold the earth gets or how much ice builds up. So, those cycles are dominant in the ice age cycles. And there have been historical times when they think there was either an incredibly huge volcanic episode in the past which led to a lot of cooling. But, volcanoes aren't as active today. And it has to do with the fact that the earth is cooling as the radioactive decay process goes on in the center of the planet. The earth is slowly cooling in terms of its core. So, there's not as much volcanic activity now. Now, the ice age that is talked about some has to do with the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and fresh water plunging into the north Atlantic which then slows down the movement of warm water from the gulf stream. And that blocking of the warm water from the gulf stream then causes a cooling of the northern hemisphere, particularly with respect to Europe. So, those are the connections that I'm aware about. Re-mineralizing the earth--there has been discussion of using minerals, particularly iron, to seed the ocean, and the ocean can respond very rapidly by growing plankton which then consume carbon dioxide. So, you're going to hear what's called geo-engineering schemes, and that will be one of them that comes out. So, that's the connections I'm familiar with. You have anything that...?
BA: You haven't heard of this particular thing that the caller mentioned, the particular prediction that she'd mentioned.
JB: No, I had not heard about...
BA: I've heard about the changing of the current in the Atlantic. And, of course, that was made popular by The Day After Tomorrow, where this all happened within a week.
JB: Right, right. Alright, well we have more callers. No. Okay. They're off they air right now. Well, our number here is 895-2448. So, there have been some films coming out about all this lately that have been getting a lot of attention. Bart, do you want to mention any of those?
BA: Well, actually one that's just coming to The History Channel on the 13th is called "Oil Apocalypse."
JB: Geez.
BA: And it has some of the usual interviewees. Heinberg will be interviewed. Matt Simmons will be interviewed. Representative Bartlett will be there. So, that looks like it could be interesting.
JB: History Channel.
BA: History Channel. The 13th. And I think it'll be replayed on the 14th and perhaps after that.
JB: CNN did a documentary, "Planet in Peril." Did you see that?
BA: I didn't. Actually, there's so many coming it's hard to keep track of them. But, I haven't actually heard anything since then.
JB: Okay. There was "The 11th Hour" by Leonardo DiCaprio in the main theatres.
BA: I did see that. Did you happen to see it?
JB: No, I didn't see it.
BA: Yeah. I thought it was pretty impressive, especially for a main stream movie; high production values. It laid out most of the problems. It didn't mention peak oil, although it was covered when they were interviewing people, but they thought they had too much already, so that was on the cutting room floor. But it looked pretty good. Problem was it was rather overwhelming and at the very end they really tried to give "something you can do" solution, but it's hard to do that in 10 minutes.
JB: Right, right. Then there was "Escape from Suburbia" has come out. That's sort of the update from "End of Suburbia"; quite a different film.
BA: Yeah, yeah, and I haven't seen that, but some people saying it's too optimistic.
JB: Right. Yeah. I thought it was interesting. The "End of Suburbia" hits you on the head, and this one is really more, "Okay, there are problems, here's what you should be doing," so it was more of an empowering feeling to it. I noticed that people come out of "End of Suburbia" were really distressed and bombed, and came out of this one a little bit more enlivened.
BA: So, you saw that.
JB: Yeah. I saw that in Willits, the west coast premier.
BA: Did you think it was accurate or fair?
JB: It was accurate, yeah. But it emphasized people really trying to work the system and also trying to kind of get out of the system; a little bit of both sides. They didn't come down really strong on either side with respect to "we're going to make it" or "we're not going to make it" or "politics is worthless" or "politics is the only way to go because we have to do this together." It basically presented people that were working through these issues from different perspectives.
BA: Sounds good to me.
JB: I thought it was a good film for introduction because it wasn't too strong. It let people kind of work through the process themselves.
BA: I think that's important. Actually, one of the best films I've seen, "Energy Crossroads." It was a...
JB: Oh, you saw that.
BA: Yeah. It was a film that ASPO was involved with, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, mostly out of Colorado. And I thought that was very good because so many of the films are pretty scary and I wouldn't give many of these films to my relatives in the midwest. But I would give "Energy Crossroads." It was gentle, common sense. Once you've absorbed that maybe we can go on to something a little more hard-hitting. But I thought that was a pretty good introduction.
JB:Yeah. I think these films have different audiences and different value, so I don't try to be too hard on any one of them if they're not, like, speaking right to me. It's not about me, it's about who are they trying to touch right now.
BA: Now, there's another one that a number of people are very enthusiastic about is "What a Way to Go."
JB: Yeah, I've seen that one. That's probably the one closest to me. That was the one that was, basically, those who have really processed this already. I would not show this to someone new to this.
BA: Not to your aunt from Wisconsin.
JB: No. What's interesting about it, though, is once people start getting into this enough they start wondering about, well, why haven't we solved this, what's going on, really, and they start getting into the social aspects of this. And what was good about that film was it's the only one to truly delve into kind of the social delusion that we're under, and the systemic drive for growth behind this. So, none of the others really tackle that very well. They tackle it a little bit, but this one really gets at that deeply. So, that's why I really appreciated that one.
BA: So that's something you'd recommend not for novices.
JB: Not for novices, right.
BA: Okay.
JB: It'll turn people off in the first 15 minutes if they're not ready for it.
BA: Now, another one--and this surprised me--"Crude Awakening." Have you seen that?
JB: I have not, but it's getting strong reviews in Europe.
BA: Very good reviews. And it's also getting reviews here. Some people say... and the nature of the reviews really depends on what people think of peak oil. So, those of us who are into it say, "pretty good show," those who are opposed to it... usually their reviews are, "peak oil is a delusion."
JB: Right, right.
BA: So apparently it's being shown in regular theatres in Europe.
JB: Yeah, right. I'd like to see that one. Well, Bart, we're coming up at the end of the hour here. Oil is... what's oil doing today? It was nearing... it was 96 a barrel for almost all last week and probably going to keep going up, I think. But, we'll see what happens, huh?
BA: Yeah, I... from day to day, who knows, and were all thinking that $100 per barrel is not that far off.
JB: No, it's definitely not. Well, I want to thank you. This has been The Reality Report. I'm your host, Jason Bradford, and our guest today was Bart Anderson. He is a co-editor of Energy Bulletin. Go to www.energybulletin.net for references with respect to today's show and all kinds of other stuff happening. And I want to thank our... thank you, Bart, and thank our underwriters today, Yokayo Biofuels and Leaves of Grass. Alrighty. Take care, everybody. Have a great week.
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