john_passacantando

A clear window into what happened to our democracy could be seen today as the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing, “Exploring the Skyrocketing Price of Oil,” with executives from BP, Shell, Chevron, Conoco Phillips and ExxonMobil.  I found it on C-Span.  Some of the highlights:

None of the executives could remember how much they make, although most admitted it was in excess on 2 million dollars.  They all did their best to look somber about the record high prices of oil and then went on to blame China, OPEC (remember that old boogeyman?) and most importantly, lack of access to new places to drill for oil to help make America energy independent.  These guys are paid enormous amounts of money to pretend they care about the pain the public feels when they tighten the screws on us.  Congress throws some theatrically tough questions and act concerned, although they don’t pay for the gas for their own limos.  You and I do.  So its sort of like Broadway except it seems the makeup artists use brooms.    

J. Stephen Simon, the Senior VP of ExxonMobil went through a series of arguments showing how dramatically the oil industry margins have been reduced.  By the end of his explanation it seemed that ExxonMobil was profitless, although thanks to public records we know that their profits were a record 40 billion dollars last year and are on pace to crush that record this year.  He spoke of working together to strengthen American competitiveness, advised us not to worry about the current “upcycle” (that was his euphemism for the sky high gasoline prices) and all the while whining about taxes.

All the executives stated directly or implied that the oil price crisis could be alleviated by giving them access to the last wild places where oil is still to be found in America: the Rocky Mountain Front Range, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and more coastal drilling.  If your grandmother had oil in her teeth they’d want those too.  The fact is that these sources take years to explore, destroy wild areas permanently and would only reduce the price of oil marginally.  But they would add handsomely to the oil companies’ profits.  It’s the perfect argument for the oil companies: they want more of the same, record profits, easy access to our lands and waters, continued subsidies of about 40 billion dollars a year for oil and gas (easy to remember as it is the same as ExxonMobil’s 2007 profits – and both are on track to go up in 2008), and blame the lack of access on the environmentalists.   

The fact is I am not against oil prices going up.  That is what is going to make us use less.  If oil prices were being driven up by a federal system that put a cap on the carbon that these and other companies bring into the economy and force them to buy credits to emit permitted amounts, the revenue from the credits would then go back to Americans, all Americans to help offset the higher energy costs – not drive profits higher.

The retiring head of Shell had a fun way to try and downplay the record profits.  He mumbled out something about the profits they are reporting being very large in absolute numbers but you have to look at the segments of our business, the upstream something or another, historic age of oilfields, marginal costs… 

I started to feel sorry for these guys, I felt less resentful of the 40 billion dollars in subsidies that we give these guys each year who can’t remember how many millions of dollars they are paid.  Heck, I felt like running down to the Hill and bringing them flowers.  After all, they got some pretty tough questions from the Senators.  To make matters worse, a protest kicked in, I could hear the voices in the back of the room while watching on my computer screen the faces of the witnesses as they heard somebody demanding that we separate oil and state  Dammed hippies insisting that the politicians stop taking campaign donations from the executives that they are supposed to protect Americans from, yeah, and wreck the whole game.

Pretty nuts… like enough to make you wanna take the bus.

 

 

I dreaded watching this State of the Union address.  Nevertheless, I felt hopeful.  This was going to be Bush’s last State of the Union address.  This country may actually survive Bush.  I can imagine again a day without Axis of Evil lists.  Made up stories about weapons of mass destruction, impish winks, chuckles and guffaws from the leader who oversaw a spike in our national debt like never before, the president who oversaw more corruption than any administration since Warren Harding’s, the President who intentionally confused Iraq with Al Qaeda.

But exactly 28 minutes into his speech he did it.  He talked about “taking it to ‘em” blurring 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Tonight the President was in classic form, grinning and winking like he had just pulled off a great fraternity stunt at the Delta House… not acting like the first president in US history to start and oversee the loss of TWO wars.  A President who fueled a Holy war and put our young people in front of shrapnel with the cavalier attitude of a man who has never done an honest day’s labor.  

Tonight the President spoke of the goodness and smarts of the American people even after he undermined our government for seven years.  He weakened the agencies that were designed to protect us from lead in toys, chemicals in foods and predatory lenders and employers.  He gave this government, our government, over to ExxonMobil, Ford, GM, Peabody Coal, and he’ll still be grinning on the golf course a year from now when we try to clean up this mess for the next generation.  

Bush’s speech and his seven-year reign can be summed up as “the Great Fraud.”  He promises to help New Orleans and then doesn’t.  Promises clean government and we get corruption.  Promises economic growth and we get decay.  Promises to take care of veterans and we have more and more uninsured.  

He asked for more trade agreements to “…show our neighbors in the region [Latin America] that Democracy leads to a better life.”  This democracy did not demonstrate that.  At best, we showed that our democracy was able to withstand a completely unmoored leader with an unethical team around him willing to give our government over to the corporations, especially the energy corporations.  

He promised two things that have never happened: to effectively capture carbon dioxide emissions when coal is burned (to prevent global warming) and safe nuclear power.  Both are promises by the industries that live off of massive government subsidies, subsidies dependent upon repeating these false promises.

He offered a gratuitous nod to our men and women in uniform, the thousands he has left behind to live their lives with prosthetic arms and legs. A generation of soldiers who will have to live with the fact that this war had as much to do with finishing his father’s business and enriching the security contractors as any false statement about security in the region.  

Then he rolled out an all too familiar story line: the threat from, this time Iran, its development of long range missiles, and how the U.S. will defend our oil in the Persian Gulf.  

Then hunger, AIDs, Darfur, funding for veterans, orphans, widows…  All poured from his mouth after little action for seven years.

And then it ended.  The long, false partisan applause that accompanies these speeches finally dimmed, and I thought: Go home, you’ve done enough.  We’ve got work to do.

Some days, everything goes well. So it was last Thursday, September 27 for the opening session of President Bush’s “Big Emitters” meeting. The President has effectively undermined the global effort to stop climate change (the Kyoto Protocol) but now that the public is clamoring for solutions he attempted a fake effort. Like a fraternity prank at a global diplomatic level. Bush gathered representatives from the world biggest greenhouse gas emitters, including representatives from European countries, Japan, Australia and fast growing developing nations like China and India. Bush was attempting to have two days of happy talk at the State Department in Washington, DC about voluntary measures and technological fixes. Basically, a stall.

Instead he was upbraided inside by various delegates, professionally polite people who were unusually harsh towards Bush in their comments in the press and by activists at the front gate who were making sure that Americans knew this meeting was a fraud and that leaders from other governments knew that we out front knew it was a fraud. I was there with a large group of colleagues, volunteers, interns, students, one board member (Jeffrey Hollander, CEO of Seventh Generation) and allies from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Oil Change International and the US Climate Energy Council to make the point.

We spent a day in jail but the point was made. And not just by those of us in the handcuffs. From those silken-tongued delegates to the DC Police, there was kinship all around. Bush is completely isolated. History will judge which was his larger calamity, war against Iraq or stalling on global warming. Either way he’s left us all with a world in need of repair.

Just as long as the nuclear plants are no closer than the Sun, then we can capture the energy in the form of solar and wind energy.  Why not down here on Earth?  I am asked this question frequently now that the nuclear power industry has engaged a huge public propaganda campaign to convince taxpayers (because that entire industry is built on subsidies for something that no capitalist would ever pay for).  Because nuclear power kills.  For many reasons that you have already heard from us, nuclear power is not the answer to global warming.  The plants are dangerous, vulnerable to terrorist attacks, the fuel is coveted by terrorists, there is still nowhere to safely put the waste and nobody wants to live anywhere near one of these things. 

But don't take it from me, read this profile of Dr. John Gofman, one of America's great nuclear brains, who worked for the very government trying to push nuclear plants on the public, and see what he tried to tell the country about nuclear power.  Thanks for this article to Harvey Wasserman, a long-time advisor to Greenpeace on nuclear power.

 

Harvey Wasserman

The genius doctor who diagnosed Nuke Power's deadly disease
September 7, 2007

The nuke power industry now wants $50 billion and more in loan guarantees to build new atomic reactors. As it strong-arms Congress, the warnings of the great Dr. John Gofman, who passed away last week at 88, loom ever larger.

One of history's most respected and revered medical and nuclear pioneers, Gofman's research showed as early as 1969 that "normal" radioactive reactor emissions could kill 32,000 Americans per year.

At the time, Gofman was the chief medical researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission. He told the AEC that reactor emissions must be radically reduced. The AEC demanded he change his findings, then forced him out when he refused.

Since then, reactor backers have ceaselessly and erroneously attacked Gofman and his findings. But they could hardly have picked a more brilliant, committed opponent. Gofman was both relentless and uncorrupted. His findings should have doomed from the start an industry he called "insane."

In addition to being a world-class nuclear chemist, Dr. John William Gofman was one of history's most important heart specialists. His pioneer research helped define our modern understanding about cholesterol, distinguishing "good" fatty acids from bad. Gofman's astonishing medical discoveries remain at the core of today's common wisdom about diet and heart disease.

For that work alone, Gofman was a towering figure. Throughout his life, he was friend and peer to Nobel Laureates such as Linus Pauling and George Wald.

But Gofman was also a nuclear chemist. As part of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bombs, his pioneer work helped lead to the discoveries of plutonium and certain isotopes of uranium.

Yet his career suffered from an inconvenient truth: when he discovered that atomic power plants kill people in large numbers, he refused to shut up about it.

As a full professor at the University of California, Gofman's combined medical and nuclear credentials made him an obvious choice to manage health research for the Atomic Energy Commission, which both regulated and promoted the young nuclear power industry. When public questions were raised about the health impacts of radioactive reactor emissions, Gofman was dispatched to prove the industry safe.

But his findings showed that reactors are serious killers. So even Gofman's towering resume could not protect him from the wrath of an industry determined to build all the power plants it could. He and co-researcher Arthur Tamplin were driven from their jobs.

When their POISONED POWER detailed the killing potential of atomic energy, Gofman and Tamplin were attacked mercilessly by an industry with immense investments to protect. The experience showed that no matter how impeccable their credentials, and no matter how thorough their research, any scientists whose findings might indicate problems with atomic power would be automatically "discredited" by industry flacks to who did no comparable research.

Even at his passing, the tired attacks on Gofman's findings have resurfaced.

But his research remains the gold standard on the health impacts of radiation. And as a gentle but firm advocate, mentor and friend, his integrity was matched only by his willingness to step outside traditional boundaries for what he believed.

One of Gofman's most powerful and influential moments came in 1974, when he agreed to defend a civil disobedient named Sam Lovejoy in the small town of Montague, Massachusetts. A member of a communal organic farm, Lovejoy had manually knocked over a 500-foot weather tower erected as a precursor to the building of a large twin reactor complex.

Gofman agreed to testify in Lovejoy's defense, arguing that building two nuke reactors constituted a lethal threat to the health and safety of the community. In a monumental moment for the rise of the anti-nuclear movement, Lovejoy was acquitted.

Gofman's pivotal pronouncements appear in the award-winning LOVEJOY'S NUCLEAR WAR (gmpfilms.com), which has been shown all over the world. As a pivotal struggle over a "bailout in advance" for new reactor construction rages in Congress, Gofman's words resonate with a renewed critical importance:

"The decision to build nuclear power plants," he said, "may very well be, for the first time, a decision that can result in the desecration of the Earth with respect for life for all future generations.

"Why do we want to put every city and hamlet of the United States at risk by building a thousand of these plants? We can get the power from sunshine, very easily and economically.

"When we're talking about a mass of a hundred tons or so of material, melting 5,000 degrees Farenheit, with water around, with hydrogen being generated and burning explosively, melting through concrete into soil, when someone tells me that we're sure it isn't going to go far away, I say that I've heard various forms of insanity, but hardly this form.

"Even if this hazard of a meltdown were securely answered, it doesn't alter for one second my opposition to nuclear power, because I'm concerned about the fact that whether it melts down or doesn't melt down, you 've created an astronomical amount of radioactive garbage which you must contain and isolate better than 99.99 percent perfectly, in peace and war, with human error and human malice, guerilla activity, psychotics, malfunction of equipment…do you believe that there's anything you'd like to guarantee will be done 99.99 percent perfectly for a hundred thousand years?

After fifty years of proven failure, the nuke power industry is demanding still more taxpayer handouts to create still more of this waste.

The great and good Dr. John W. Gofman warned us all against this insanity. His words and spirit remain at the core of what must be done to save this planet.

--
Harvey Wasserman is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and Senior Editor of www.solartopia.org and www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. For a fuller account of the amazing life of Dr. John Gofman, see www.beyondnuclear.org.