See:
http://www.bartleby.com/142/320.html

I urge others to write letters on this issue, with links citing sources and books like the abovementioned to major mainstream publications including the New York Times , as if they receive dozens of letters on this in response to EVERY editorial on global warming, they will feel obliged to print at least ONE representative letter. The same is true of other mainstream publications.

Further, using c/c’s of press coverage of this concern, as well as the book and copies of statements and reports by Jim Hansen, progressive organizations (like the anti-imperialist sds/mds, students for a democratic society/movement for a democratic society that has recently been restarted nationally in the US for the first time since the 60s), but also others, across the world, from Green Parties to environmental groups and churches and unions at all levels should be urged to at least call for the solutions that Jim Hansen and others have made clear are necessary.

If these concerns can at least become part of the ‘standard fare’ of progressive media and institutions and discourse, then mainstream institutions will be forced to respond.

I will be VERY frank and note that even if the system is responsive beyond even the rosiest of notions (remember how disappointing the CLINTON administration was on the environment, including global warming, after Gore on the ticket raised some hopes) — the kinds of changes that will be needed will require an additional EXTREMELY HIGH level of militancy supported by HUGE mass-based movements. I confess that I am less than optimistic.

For a picture of what an anti-utopia, where nature has been destroyed by a “Tory Horse-shit” elite so that they can preside over the ruins, see Walt Whitman’s: “Respondez! Respondez!”

See: http://www.bartleby.com/142/320.html

To avoid such an outcome, the kind of confrontation with the massive underground repression in advanced industrial societies that progressives are too squeamish and/or too scared to do now will be ABSOLUTELY necessary. There are many requisites of this nature, and they will require a revolution not just in the social system, but first in the way that AUTHENTIC progressives think, and in our insistence on authenticity in order to build the kinds of movements that we need.

In January I took part in a BBC broadcast with 1998 Economics Nobel laureate Professor Amartya Sen (Harvard), medical historian Dr Sanjoy Bhattacharya (Wellcome Institute, University College London) and others about the 1943-1945 man-made and “forgotten” Bengal Famine that killed 6-7 million people in Bengal and adjacent provinces (see: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/bengalfamine_programme.html , http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/2005/07/forgotten-holocaust-194344-bengal.html , http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ , http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s19040.htm ) .

When the price of rice doubled and finally doubled again people who could not buy food died under a merciless British regime due to denial of what Professor Amartya Sen calls “entitlement” to food for survival.

Unfortunately the Bengal Famine is now being re-run in the Third World (history ignored yields history repeated) but potentially on a 100 fold greater scale – already the UN and FAO report that the impoverished 4 billions of the world are being priced out of the global food market.

However it gets worse because biofuels are actually NOT CO2 neutral – whether it is fallow land or rain forest, the latest scientific studies say that there is a HUGE additional CO2 cost from diverting the land to growing the biofuel crops).

Thus US scientists (Drs Timothy Searchinger, Ralph Heimlich et al) in the top journal Science (February 2008) state: “Using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%. This result raises concerns about large biofuel mandates and highlights the value of using waste products.”

The Biofuel perversion is mass murder in a globalized food market and with only a 25% efficiency in going from grain to chicken meat so is the luxury of meat-eating as the world enters a price-based expansion of massive existing food deprivation that already kills 16 million people annually, 44,000 daily, 2/3 infants.