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I had a great opportunity to attend a lecture by Jim Hansen, Director of NASA Goddard institute of space sciences. He was the one who alerted the public in 1988 about global warming.
The lecture was on ‘Threats to planet: Implications for Inter-generational justice and energy policies’. Jim Hansen did lack the energy and inspiration, when compared of Al Gore, but did get the message across. I say this because Jim Hansen’s is the first lecture I attended after Al gore’s in OCT. I still have some inspiration going on in me from that speech! Anyways, I have not seen or know another environmentalist who is such a strong advocator of Coal moratorium.
Here is the link to the Jim Hansen’s page and this presentation is similar to one he gave us.
I have been influenced lately by Dr Vandhana Shiva’s Anti-globalization rhetoric. I came across ‘Mustard Oil ban in India’, while reading her ‘Stolen Harvest: Hijacking of the global food supply’ book. As the book just mentioned the incident without going into much detail, I ventured to do a little digging of my own.
India banned the sale of mustard oil in 1998 after deaths due to dropsy [contamination in the oil from argemone]. About 50+ people died and more than 2000 fell ill in Delhi. Read the clip here from down to earth, one of India’s leading environmental magazines.
India banned both loose and packed mustard oil and a month later raised the ban on PACKED mustard oil.
What was the impact of the ban, or a better question would be “Who won and who lost? “
Winners:
US agribusiness Corporation Monsanto who made money on the free GE Soybean imports
Entry of ITC into the mustard business in India
Losers:
Small mustard farmers
The domestic mustard oil industry
Indian Mustard oil consumers
The timing of the contamination has sparked of a conspiracy theory involving the multinationals. Click here for ‘The mustard oil conspiracy ‘by Vandana Shiva in the ecologist magazine. A must read to understand the incident full circle. The article did make me feel [and actually is the case] that the rich & powerful economies do treat developing economies as sink to the products [i.e GE soybeans] that nobody wants!
Finally, a piece if trivia, who do you think could possibly own the patent for mustard?
Hmmm…the answer is ‘Calgene’! Ooh..Not who you had in mind!
Yes, Calgene, owned by Mansanto, owns the patent for mustard. Unbelievable…believe it!
Also read this article from India Together on India’s edible oil imports and the WTO.
Part II (The parts are not based on the parts in the book but roughly based on my reading and review of the book)
I was unaware of the fact that things might be a lot worse and scarier than portrayed in the media or in the IPCC report. In the book Friedman says ‘ The scientists are punished for overstating and not punished for understating…..To make climate models scientists take little pieces of information of what we know happened in the past, check how it corresponds to how it actually happened and then try to project into the future from the earlier trend lines’
Bill Collins a senior scientists in the Earth Sciences division of the Lawrence berkely National Laboratory says ‘Nobody captured in their energy models the acceleration of emissions from china in the last five years. That is what is so scary. A lot of IPCC math was developed when emissions from China were going down in the 1990s and the Soviet Union was collapsing. What is happening now is worse than the worse case projections that went into the IPCC model’
IPCC builds a summary for policy makers, which is what we are all familiar with. The book talks about how the policy document is reviewed line by line by government representatives and they get to veto anything they don’t like. Click here for more information on how this is done. There is criticism that the summary doesn’t represent exact science and perhaps downplays the impact of global warming! What crazy weird world do we live in? The mankind itself is in danger and we lowball it! The policy makers should perhaps be tried for crimes against humanity. These people are no different than the perpetrators of genocide. If we cannot trust these reports to be accurate, what else can we not trust? I guess we know the answer to that question!
John Holdren who has spent much of his life studying the aspects of climate change Issue, has what he wryly calls “Holdren’s first principal “when it comes to climate change. It goes like this ‘The more aspects of the problem you know something about, the more pessimistic you are. Someone who studies atmospheric science is pessimistic. Some one who knows atmospheric science and oceans is more pessimistic and someone who knows atmospheric science, oceans and ice is even more pessimistic and someone who knows about atmospheric science, oceans , ice and biology is still more pessimistic and someone who knows about all those things , as well as engineering , economics , and politics is the most pessimistic of all – because then you know how long it takes to change all the systems that are driving the problem
Climate change discussion is not complete with out discussing the climate change deniers.
“If ninety eight doctors say my son is ill and needs medication and two say ‘No, he doesn’t need any medication. He’s fine’, I will go with the ninety-eight. It’s common sense - same with global warming we go with the majority, the large majority” says California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
Friedman says “I’m convinced that Climate change is real. But we not only need people to accept that it’s real, but also to accept just how real it could be…”
The book also talks about Dr Heidi Cullen, a Climatologist for the weather channel who says ‘Local meteorologist should give climate change science some mention in there daily weather reports’. Dr Cullen’s blog ‘Junk Controversy Not Junk Science’ did create a controversy. I have always wondered why the meteorologist don’t talk about this when it is so relevant and also has AMS (American Meteorological Society) seal. You know one would think meteorologist would know better, it turns out, they don’t.
To be continued in Part III
Part 1: Hot Flat & Crowded - Thomas Friedman
(The parts are not based on the parts in the book but roughly based on my reading and review of the book)
It is a comprehensive book that covers aspects of climate change and the connections to US oil consumption, Terrorism, China, and India and back to the US. I had bits and pieces of information from the media. This book kind of connected the dots for me. A must read as an environment literacy for a common man.
He starts with where we are now, explains what he means by Hot, Flat and Crowded.
Hot – Not a brain teaser – global warming
Flat – Rise of the middle class. The rise of American carbon copies all over the world
Crowded - The growth of the world population
He dedicates an entire chapter on American lifestyles and how it is changing the world. The discussion on how America’s oil consumption feeds the terrorists and creating petro-dollars/dictatorship is fascinating. The graph on Freedom Vs crude oil prices is a new piece of information that caught my eye. A phenomenon diagnosed as ‘resource curse’ or the ‘Dutch disease’
Few Excerpts from the book with my comments embedded:
I was still living in the post 9/11 world until this book came along. ‘I don’t think we’re post anything anymore – I think we’re pre-something totally new “, said David Rothkopf, the energy consultant, in the book and I agree. I think we are pre to a staggering disaster the mankind has every encountered. I think we are pre to finding a way out of the monumental environmental challenge that lies ahead of us
Friedman talks about what happens if everybody lives like the materialistic, consumption based American lifestyle (calling them ‘carbon copies’ in the book). What happens if the current 1 billion population living the American lifestyle increase to 2 billion or 3 billion? Simple answer – the planet will get hot !
In a world that is hot – a world that is more and more affected by global warming – guess who among us is going to suffer the most? It will be the people who caused it the least – the poorest people in the world, who have no electricity, no cars and no power plants and virtually no factories to emit CO2 into the atmosphere. The developing and the underdeveloped will be hardest hit
An Egyptian Cabinet minister remarked ‘It is like the developed world ate all the hors d’oeuvres, all the entrees and all the desserts and then invited the developing world for a little coffee” and asked us to split the whole bill. With US being 5% of the world’s population emits 25% of world’s green house gas emissions. When the time comes (it is already here) all will have to spilt the bill and this will muddy the international waters further more.
‘We Americans are in no position to lecture anyone’ says Friedman ‘ But we are in a position to know better…..if we Americans do not redefine what an American middle class lifestyle is , we will need to colonize three more planets. Because we are going to make this planet so hot and strip it so bare of resources that, nobody including us will be able to live like Americans one day‘ America is on the driver’s seat of the environmental pollution bus. Will it be in the driver’s seat of the environmental solution bus? So far it doesn’t seem like it.
To be continued in Part II
Sorry about the late posting! I didn’t realize that some of you were eagerly waiting for this
Here’s the race results and you can check out some pictures here
Yes, I took 7 hours 3 minutes & 60 seconds to complete the race!
Yeh, I’m a marathon runner!
Initially I was worried about not being able to complete the race, as I needed to get to 18 ¾ mile marker by noon. It was a bit hard to do so as all the hills were in the first part of the race. If I didn’t get there by noon, I would not be allowed to complete the race. Also, I had to at least, keep 15-16 min/mile pace so as to complete the race.
I started of good and was going with 14min/mile pace and every mile I kept loosing few seconds. I got to the marker way before noon and after that it was just about completing the race. As far as I was concerned that 18 ¾ marker was my victory. Because I knew once I crossed that marker, I would finish the race even if there was, you know, a tsunami!
No matter how hard you train, the last few miles are the hardest. You give it all at this point! All I had to do was just put one foot in front of the other. The last four miles is on the great highway where the cold breeze from the ocean, hits right on your face. At that point, you hardly have any energy left; you are not running ( I mean trotting) fast enough to keep your body warm, as every muscle in your body hurts and you are burning whatever energy is left to keep yourself warm. It all adds up and makes you want to give up and that’s why at that point the coaches come looking for us and run with us to the finish line. If not for my coach Tim and another coach [whose name escapes my mind right now] ran the last few Kilometers with me, it would have been one loooooong run
As they announced my arrival at the finish line, it kinda felt weird. It was weird, because it felt like it was a dream. It was like, wait, did I juuust…complete a marathon…no way! I didn’t cry, but I could feel the warm water come down my cheeks. Guess this is what happens when a dream comes true-you think it’s a dream. While I was trying to get a grip on reality, I was handed the Tiffany co. neck lace and someone cut off the timing chip of my shoes, some one handed me a Nike T-shirt and then one the TNT volunteer ushered me to the LLS tent where some one checked in for me and I grabbed a sandwich and sat with the coaches for a little chat about how the race went for me. They were full of praise, of course. They told me not to underestimate what happened today, it is no ordinary accomplishment; it was a colossal achievement and deserved to be celebrated. I had set for myself an extremely tough goal and I had achieved!
I picked up my stuff and boarded the shuttle to AT & T Park. The girl sitting next to me in the bus asked how it all went for me and I proudly showed her the necklace. She then told me that, she couldn’t complete the race and was feeling very sad about it. That’s when I realized that I could have been her…… but I wasn’t, I was victorious!
Believe it or not, the victory has blocked the pain of my mind. I still couldn’t walk, I could drive well, I couldn’t climb stairs, but that didn’t matter to me. When I actually apologized for taking a long time (it seemed like eternity to me) to climb the bus, the lady behind me said ‘Don’t worry honey, we are all on the same boat’
On my drive back home, I slowly went thru the race in my mind and I kept saying to myself I’m going to do it again. That feeling of accomplishment, the euphoria, I tell you, is worth all the pain! I wish Nikki was there to cheer for me and share that historic moment with me that day.
So, next step is to first get some rest and second, to work on improving my marathon pace from 16 Min/mile to 15 min/mile so I can finish the race with in 6 ½ hours. Wish me luck!
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