Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Apple Crops in Northeast Sabotaged by Big Oil’s Changing the Climate

Saratoga Apple’s Nate Darrow says his apple crop will be 1/4 of normal this year because of the weird Climate Changed weather this spring. A long hot spell in the spring tricked the trees into blossoming ten days to two weeks early. Then came a fairly normal cold patch that froze the forming fruit.

Looking over his boxes of Delicious, Galas, and Sun Crisp apples at the Dorset Farmers Market, Nate said, “This time next year we won’t have all these apples still in stock.” He estimates that his harvest will be 20-25% of normal, maybe as low as 10%. “It depends on how well the trees do at the top of the orchard, the trees that are above the pocket of cold air that settles in the valley.”

A few weeks ago, I freaked out when I saw snow covered blossoms arriving before the bees were out. Yet my pear trees seem to be setting some fruit. Perhaps my fruit survived because it wasn’t too cold. Nate said that the young fruit won’t handle 29 degrees or under. A little snow on the blossoms is OK. Some growers will actually spray water on orchards because the conversion of water to ice actually releases some heat that will keep the temperature above 29. Minor temperature changes at certain periods mean the difference between a successful or difficult year.

This is the Climate Crisis. A hardworking fruit grower has his livelihood made unpredictable by an ecosystem swinging out of rhythm. (Perhaps he should sue BP for lost income.) This is just another data point allowing us to ‘”solve for pattern” that says we are already living on an Earth experiencing a Climate Crisis.

Bill McKibben said on Democracy Now recently, “The planet that we live on now is different, and in fundamental ways, from the one we were born onto. The atmosphere holds about five percent more water vapor that it did forty years ago. That’s an incredible change in one of the basic physical parameters of the planet, and it explains all those deluges and downpours. The ocean is 30 percent more acidic, as it absorbs all that carbon from the atmosphere. NASA said yesterday that we’ve just come through the warmest January, February, March on record, that 2010 is going to be the warmest year that we’ve ever scene.”

The “debate” about “Is Climate Change happening?” should be over. McKibben’s new book Eaarth gives dozens of examples of how our world is already experiencing a Climate Catastrophe. He says that we live on an Earth so changed we might as well call it a new name, like Eaarth. But the debate isn’t over because it’s not a debate. “The Debate” is a well-documented public relations stalling tactic by fossil fuel companies to confuse the public while grubbing every last fossil fuel dollar. Wall Street will be under water before Exxon Mobil stops funding “The Debate.” Mother Jones magazine reports that Exxon Mobil spent 55 million dollars to fund think tanks to contradict mainstream science. The Debate Stalling Tactic has worked because the sky looks so big, the science is complicated, and consequences seem far off.

I guess it’s Human Nature “to need to see it to believe it.” Seeing this out-of-phase spring unfolding was my wake-up call. Now I’m sure that the Climate Crisis is actually happening and I’m a little freaked out because that means humanity is in a very dire situation indeed.

Skies are air oceans, limited, able to be polluted, changeable in their make-up. Carbon may invisibly disappear out of our tailpipes but it doesn’t drop out of the atmospheric mash-up for a thousand years! Carbon in the atmosphere takes a long time to be sequestered, or gathered back by plants. Carbon is more like a cathedral than a fart. Every flippant car trip causes pollution that will be in the atmosphere for 1000 years. As in, “Oh my god, do you really have to drive to return that movie?”

So we need to leave the coal in the hole and leave the oil in the ground. We need to stop burning stuff. We need to make burning oil and coal ILLEGAL! We need electric cars powered by an electrical grid that’s charged by solar and wind. We would already have these technologies if those selfish oil companies hadn’t been blocking and stalling and ‘debating’ for 40 years.

The BP Gulf Coast Oil Catastrophe is our national wake up call. We need to get off the oil. Oil companies are sociopathic non-human entities that don’t care who lives or dies. The oil companies are forcing humanity onto a Trail of Tears towards runaway climate change and Planet Death. We must stop them, stop burning oil, and protect the ecosystem stability that allow us to grow apples.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Take Bush out of post-abuse Memory Hole

George W. Bush has disappeared from the national stage and national mind because neither the Left or the Right wants to think about him. Republicans want to disappear Bush to remove scarlet letter W from around their mid-term election necks. Democrats are so sick of this guy that mentioning his name makes the room unhappy and reaching for the Paxil. But we must remember George W. Bush because voters are blaming Obama for Bush-caused problems.

Americans are like people healing from abuse by blocking bad memories. The mention of the Bush name calls forth dozens of unpleasant memories and association, from war, lies, deceit, and to simply incompetant coasting aristocratic governence. So nobody speaks of him. He is down the memory hole.

In George Orwell's book 1984, in a big bureocratic government building, workers had nicknamed the garbage shoots placed throughout the building "memory holes'. Scraps of paper were shoved there to disappear. The state felt free to re-write history, and old propaganda that countered the new propaganda was put down the memory hole.

So it is with Bush. He goes down the memory hole and the Republicans re-brand as libertarian populists.

We live in the United States of Amnesia, as writer Gore Vidal put it. Like a spiritual teacher with an obssessive focus on "The Now", our nation is disconnected to the flow of events that brought us here. Other countries aren't always this way. Some of the South American countries maintain a fierce historical narrative that puts American in the colonialist villian role. Democrats could use a little bit of that radical historical memory to remember who the villians in this story are.

President Obama has been doing a good job with a bad situation. The Bush Team handed him an exploding situation and he defused it. But elections aren't about the truth, they are about national mood, about the strange tidal flows of shaped opinion. With a mid-term coming up that could hand Congress to the Republicans, it's a tight time for Obama.

Somehow, the Right has gelled around being anti-Obama, and the Left has lost the sense that Obama is 'our guy'.
Obama has been governing with a sort of post-partisan elite bureocratic pragmatism, not as a Democrat particularly. And so the Democratic Base is confused, like "'do we have a dog in this fight?"

Luckily, we still remember that we dislike Bush. When we remember...

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Climate Leadership Goes South

The South American nations have now taken leadership role in the Climate Crisis.

From siding with good science to democracy in format, the recent Cochabamba people's summit was a startling revelation in the possibility of a people-centered process to address Our Biggest Problem.

For somebody freaked out about climate change, I'm really psyched to hear a president talk about making 1% temperature increase as the lowest possible goal. Bolivia's Evo Morales is way way out ahead of the herd, like Al Gore in being one of the few global leaders to get it. Al Gore has a great new article, by the way, in The New Republic connecting the dots on the oil spill and the oil industry everyday screw-the-planet. Sure the oil spill sucks, but so does another day of L.A. freeways.

It seems there is a near complete American media silence on the recent events in Bolivia. Goggle: World People's Conference on Climate Crisis and Rights for Mother Earth, and sign up for their e-mail list and you'll suddenly be privy to a social movement with the snap and attitude to be worthy of addressing the Climate Crisis.