This
Ecoshock program features two interviews.�
We start out talking about South America, and how changes to the Amazon
rainforest could impact the climate of the whole world.
I also
cover two jaw-dropping stories this week:
#1. the
complete fake-out as General Motors claims to pay back billions to the
American and Canadian governments.� Wow,
car sales must be great!� Nope.� The whole thing was a sham, as GM used some
TARP money to repay the government.�
Kinda like paying your mortgage with your VISA card.
#2. the
giant Canadian media chain Canwest failed to report it�s paper the
National Post, and denialist �journalist� Terrance Corcoran � are being sued
by Canadian scientist Andrew Weaver for libel.� Details below � but the point is, we hear all about the opinions
of the pro-fossil fuel guys, but not the news they are being called liars by
top scientists.� It�s more media
censorship on climate affairs, in my opinion.
Then we
switch gears, looking at how the evolution of our brains has failed to keep
up with the problems generated by technology. Meanwhile, brain and
psychological research is being used against us, in the consumer society.
Let's
start with the situation in South America, touching on the recent Cochebamba
climate conference, the situation in Venezuela, and then the Amazon climate
debate.
Avatar
director James
Cameron was just in the Amazon, meeting with tribes people who will be
displaced by a new dam slated for the deep jungle.�
It's the
Belo Monte dam on the Xingu River, an upstream tributary.� Flooding at least 400,000 square kilometers
of forests and farms, if built, Belo Monte will be the world's third largest
dam.� Though the Brazilian courts
recently ruled against it, the government has forged ahead, already awarding
the construction contract.
No one
doubts the Brazilian people need more power, and they don't need the emissions
and cost of coal or oil imports.� The
giant metropolis of Sao Paulo has gone dark, or browned out, many times.� If South America cannot power it's cities,
the exodus to cut down the Amazon may be worse.� Brazil also hopes to expand their electricity-hungry aluminum
industry.
And yet, everything
about this mega-dam project doesn't make sense.� As we learn from Amazon
Watch, "the National Amazon Research Institute calculated that during
its first 10 years of operation, Belo Monte would emit 112 million Mega grams
(Mg) of CO2 equivalent, equal to the CO2 emissions of 2,156,460 passenger
vehicles per year."� When all is
said and done, the Belo Monte dam will add to the climate change that already
threatens to dry out the Amazon.� Not to
mention the lost species, and the impact on the weather of not just Africa, but
the whole planet.
And
during the long months of the dry season, this dam will hardly produce much,
dropping to 10 percent of it's rated capacity for three to five months.� Unless the Brazilian government builds
another five damaging dams upstream to feed the complex.� In fact, there are reports
saying up to 70 dams are planned for the Amazon.
If the
drought of 2005 returns, the project will fail, just as the electricity system
of Venezuela is failing now, due to lack of rain and runoff for hydro power.
We're
going to hear about that, with notes on the recent climate conference in
Cochebamba, Bolivia - against the big picture of the drying Amazon.� Our guest is Nikolas Kozloff.� His new book is "No Rain in the Amazon:
How South America's Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet."
-----
THE
BIG MEDIA LIE (in
fact two of them�.)
How can I still be surprised when mainstream media tells another big lie, or squelches an important story?� And yet, a couple of whoppers last week left me with jaw dropped ...again.
After the
government-backed assassination attacks on Toyota, the rival to
government-owned General Motors, we were treated to an all-out top-down
media blitz on the sudden success of GM.�
Headlines and newscasters proudly announced the local boys just paid 6.7
billion dollars back to the American government, and another 1.2 billion to the
Canadians - 5 years ahead of schedule.�
Wow, General Motors cars are selling like hot cakes.� Billions of dollars in profits are rolling
in.� We see President Obama and his team
self-congratulating, and more air time from the GM CEO Ed Whitacre saying
"We're back and we're the best!"
Yippee.� Except, it was all the big lie you hardly
heard about.� Much as I hate to cite
Fox News, or Republican Senator Chuck Grassley - it seems confirmed all
those billions came not from big sales or profits, but right from the back
pocket of the taxpayers, again.� In a
shell game for the ages, TARP man Neil Barofsky confirmed GM used Treasury
Funds squirreled away in a bail-out fund to pay out loans.� It's like saying "Hey, I paid $50,000
off on my mortgage" - but putting it all on VISA.� Here is another
source on that story, from a newswire for lawyers.
In fact, GM
has lost more billions over the last quarters, totaling $4.3 billion in
losses since their bankruptcy last July.�
Their next financial statement for the first few months of 2010 isn't
due until May.� But sales are probably
around 25 percent of what they were in 2007.�
Which is great news for the atmosphere.�
If we really cared about our grandchildren, we wouldn't build another
oil-burning car.� The world is
already over-populated with gas-guzzlers.
Still,
shuffling billions in taxpayer money, and calling that success, is an
impressive con game, even by American standards.
Meanwhile,
the Canadians play their own.� Of course
you heard that climate scientist Andrew Weaver is suing a Canadian newspaper
and several denialist journalists for libel.� No?� Maybe that's because
the story has been censored in most Canadian media.� I had to find out about it from a Radio Ecoshock listener in
Australia (published
in the Sydney Morning Herald), where the story was republished from the
Guardian newspaper, in Great Britain.�
Andrew
Weaver is a real climate scientist, and a lead author of the 2007 report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on climate change.�
He was viciously attacked by a right-wing business newspaper called the
National Post, especially by a hack called Terrance Corcoran.� In four newspaper articles, and subsequent
virulent comments, Weaver was accused of cherry-picking climate data, in
order to keep his research money coming.�
These articles also claimed that there has been no increase in annual
global mean temperatures, and that climate models are "falling
apart".
Weaver
told the Guardian, ''If I sit back and do nothing to clear my name, these
libels will stay on the internet forever.''�
And he's taken the unusual step of demanding the National Post
arrange a retraction from the various denier web sites that used their attacks.� The newspaper, he says, endorsed attack
sites by linking to their reprints of the articles.
Get all
the links you need, including the full legal filing, from Tim Lambert's Deltoid
science blog here.
Apparently,
you can't just make up lies about climate scientists, and climate science, and
get away with it, any more.
I found
news of this lawsuit in the overseas press, the government-owned CBC, and in
various blogs.� But nothing about it in
my local newspaper, even though Andrew Weaver is a well-known professor at the
University of Victoria, not a hundred miles from Vancouver.� That is because Canada suffers from a
horrible media monopoly known as CanWest.�
Established by the Asper family, CanWest owns both major newspapers in
Vancouver, plus a television station.�
And dozens more major newspapers across Canada, including the National
Post.
So when
the newspaper chain is accused of libel, of printing things that are claimed to
be grossly untrue, most Canadians don't get to hear anything about it.� I call that censorship.
Meanwhile,
Canwest went bankrupt, and the newspapers are up for sale.� We can only hope the new owners will kick
out the stable of climate deniers that filled up so many pages with
anti-science opinion, and "we love our Tar sands" hysteria.� A vain hope, I know, but that's all we've
got left.
------
Meanwhile,
we have to get ready for the big decline.� Be sure and look for the article "The Imminent Crash Of
Oil Supply: Be Afraid" By Nicholas C. Arguimbau.� I found it at countercurrents.org, thanks to
a tip from listener, videographer and long-time media activist Tom Childs.
The graph
of oil supplies comes from
the United States Department of Energy.�
It is
backed up by another
report from the United States military's Joint Forces Command.�
We are
running out of oil, folks.� You will start to see it for
real starting around 2012.� Everyone
knows it, and no one - not governments, not corporations, and not most of us,
is really getting ready for a long steep decline in world oil supply.� Prices go up.� Food goes down.� Economies
crash for real.� Look it up.
As
Arguimbau points out, it can't be mere coincidence that the emissions cuts
from fossil fuels proposed by the American government happen to match their
latest projections of the fuel left.�
An "18% drop from 2005 by 2020, and an 85% drop from 2005 by
2050."
The quick
answer for local survival is rapid transition away from fossil dependence.� From transition towns to localization - as
we've been saying on Radio Ecoshock for years.�
We've dropped from the possibility of a "steady state" economy
- too late for that - to the new movement for "de-growth".� I'll be covering a De-growth conference
soon.� And next week, we'll hear from
one of the most credible witnesses for the need to quickly reduce our economies
- a new speech from Dr. Bill Rees, the co-inventor of the Ecological Footprint.
Rees
questions whether our brain has evolved enough to cope with the challenges
posed by Peak Oil and radical climate change.�
We'll begin our preparation for his speech, with our next interview.� A Harvard evolutionary psychologist helps
me work through the big question: "Are we smart enough to survive?"
Our guest
is Dr. Deirdre Barrett.
She's a popular writer, and a psychology researcher at Harvard Medical School.
Deirdre
specializes in two fields that seem almost unrelated.� She has published and written books about dreams - how we
manage to keep on "thinking," in a way, even at night.� We've all heard the expression "Let me
sleep on that" which assumes that some deep cognitive process goes on.� People from artists to the religious have
made significant works and life changes based on dreams.
Her first book was on hypnotherapy.� It's called "The Pregnant Man and Other Cases from the Hypnotherapist's Couch".� Her next, "The Committee of Sleep" is about dreams and creative problem solving.� She's also published "Trauma and Dreams."
Here
is a link to her book page on Amazon.
Her most
recent books, though, are on evolutionary psychology, with the idea that
humans, including the human mind, evolved to deal with primeval circumstances
like hunting, and the reactions necessary for survival in a non-technical
world.
I called
Deirdre after reading a review of her new book "Supernormal Stimuli,
How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose," published by
W.W. Norton in 2010.� It seemed to
answer so many questions about how the consumer culture worked - and why we
react so poorly to big problems like Peak Oil and climate change.� Finally a bit of light on why we humans
continue to make such stupid choices, long after we know the facts.�
We
started, as the book "Supernormal Stimuli" does, with the intriguing
portrait of the Dutch biologist Niko Tinbergen, and his sometime sidekick,
Konrad Lorenz.� That's great writing
that kicks up some deep issues.
Actually,
I found Niko Tinbergen's research a bit alarming and depressing.� Natural creatures can be easily fooled by
just one fake clue, such as the right shade of red to a Stickleback fish,
or a wooden carving, with the right curved belly to suit eggs.� I wonder, does love exist in Nature?� Are we all pre-programmed, just
victims of stimuli, no matter how false?
No
wonder, in the face of massive advertising and movie stars, so many millions
bought cigarettes and passively died...
There has been a long-standing argument against taking biological
observations, into the complexities of human thought, and social
organization.� Allow me this train of
three questions coming to mind.� First,
I ask myself "Have experiments been done with super stimuli and
humans?" Then "Should they be done at all?" And, finally I
realize, with all the advertising, propaganda, and product design, "Oh-oh,
we are living that experiment now."�
Just consider the super stimulation that a McMansion represents.� No wonder millions of people, and even the banks as former guardians of credit, succumbed to this unreal fable about housing.� What about the world's tallest, most Phallic building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai?
As a parent, or grandparent, is there a way to help protect very
young children from commercially crafted supernormal stimuli, that are designed
to take advantage of them?
One spooky thing about applying scientific study to human behavior
and cultures: once an idea, like the imprinting geese by Konrad Lorenz, becomes
popularly accepted, it gets misapplied to everything everywhere.� And then later, if the theory is found to be
untrue, like some of Freud's ideas - it doesn't matter.� The fact that millions of people have
accepted it as useful and true, makes it still useful and true as social cause
and currency.� If it takes us decades to
learn something, it sometimes needs hundreds of years to unlearn it.�
In a personal email, Deirdre told me "Our instincts about dangers and
self-protection are so strongly coded for hostile humans, dangerous animals,
and instantaneous natural disasters and not coded for modern issues like
gradual planetary warming or long-term depletion of resources."
So we
talk about the applications of evolutionary psychology, and biology, to the big
problems of the day.
The Wall
Street Journal review of the book complained about Deirdre�s theory that humans
love complexity and problem solving so much - that they will take on a huge
project, rather than applying simpler solutions.� She gives the example of the investment in nuclear technology,
rather than using solar and wind.
We also
talk about how cars, and other appliances hawked on
TV, may just be supernormal stimuli at work.� Could the consumer society function without these primitive brain
responses?
And...knowing what we know, what is an archaic humanoid to
do?� How do we get out of the muddle of
automatic responses to stimuli?� Can we
use supernormal stimuli "for good" instead of self-destructive crud?
And here, as they said in the ancient age of television, is the 64
thousand dollar question.� Do you
think humans have the evolutionary equipment to survive this civilization?
Be sure and listen for Deirdre�s answer.
Next week, we'll hear a powerful speech from the co-inventor of
the ecological footprint concept.� Dr.
Bill Rees, from the University of British Columbia, explains how we have
already surpassed the renewable resources of the planet.� He says, only a planned economic
contraction, perhaps even a guided collapse, can save what is left of the
biosphere for future generations.
Alex
Smith
host
http://www.ecoshock.org