"Satellite monitoring by the NSIDC in Boulder, Colorado, shows that the melting of sea ice has been unusually fast this year, with as much as 40,000 sq km now disappearing daily.

The melt season started almost a month later than normal at the end of March and is not expected to end until September.

Meanwhile, research from the polar science centre at the University of Washington suggests that the volume of sea ice in March 2010 was 20,300 cubic km, 38% below the 1979 level when records began."

And according to James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and one of the world’s most prominent climate scientist, new data also shows that the global surface temperatures may also be at record levels. According to a newly released paper by Hansen and his colleagues the temperature on Earth has for the past 12 months been 0.65C warmer than previous global temperatures from 1951 to 1980. The paper also shows that the global temperature this year will break the previous record from 2005.

"It is likely that the 2010 global surface temperature … will be a record", Hansen writes.

"Global warming on decadal timescales is continuing without let-up … we conclude that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.2C/decade that began in the late 1970s."

The Guardian article has written about more findings so be sure to check that article out. Especially worth noting is the new data which shows that January to April this year has been the hottest on record so far. Climate Progress writes:

"Last month tied May 1998 as the hottest on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-May on record.

Also, the combined land-surface air and sea-surface water temperature anomaly for March-April-May was 0.73°C above the 1951-1980 mean, blowing out the old record of 0.65°C set in 2002."

And the temperature records continues! New data also shows that the temperature during January-June this year has been the hottest ever recorded by NASA.

"It’s all the more powerful evidence of human-caused warming “because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect,” as a recent NASA paper notes."

But La Nina conditions might build up during July and August which might reduce the average heat temperature for 2010.

Meteorologist Jeff Masters also notes that new temperature records have been reached in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Chad, Niger, Pakistan and Myanmar. Masters writes:

"We’ve now had eight countries in Asia and Africa, plus the Asian portion of Russia, that have beaten their all-time hottest temperature record during the past two months. This includes Asia’s hottest temperature of all-time, the astonishing 53.5°C (128.3°F) mark set on May 26 in Pakistan…. This week’s heat wave in Africa and the Middle East is partially a consequence of the fact that Earth has now seen three straight months with its warmest temperatures on record, according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center."

Also read:  Hundreds die in Indian heatwave – Death toll expected to rise as India faces record temperatures of up to 122F in hottest summer on record

Australia has had a notorious history of imposing invasion, occupation, holocaust and genocide on Indigenous peoples that continues to this day. However with the support of 90% of the Australian people, successive pro-coal Australian Governments have effectively committed to inaction on its world leading per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution and hence to Climate Genocide of the Developing World.

White Australia has an appalling secret genocide history that falls into 3 phases, specifically:

(1) 1788-1901, as a genocidal British colony involved in the Aboriginal Genocide (in which the Indigenous or Aboriginal population fell from 1 million to 0.1 million) and in genocidal British colonial atrocities (notably in the Sudan, India, South Africa, China, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands);

(2) 1901-2001, as a UK- and then US-linked independent nation involved in continuing Aboriginal Genocide (by occasional massacres, deprivation, social exclusion and forced removal of Indigenous children from their mothers) and with genocidal, civilian targetting, UK and US imperial atrocities in Europe and in nearly every Asian country – Australia participated in WW1 (invading or bombing numerous countries) , invasion of Russia, WW2 (invading or bombing numerous countries), and military actions against Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Iraq ); and

(3) 2001- the present, in continuing the Aboriginal Genocide (9,000 excess Indigenous deaths annually) and as a lackey of US imperialism involved militarily in the ongoing Iraqi Genocide (post-invasion violent and non-violent excess deaths 2.3 million, 5-6 million refugees) and ongoing Afghan Genocide (post-invasion violent and non-violent excess deaths 3-7 million, 3-4 million refugees with a further 2.5 million Pashtun refugees from US robot-bombed NW Pakistan); and diplomatic legislative and financial involvement in the ongoing Palestinian Genocide by racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel (post-invasion excess deaths 0.3 million, 7 million refugees). [1].

White Australia has participated in all post-1950 US Asian wars that have been associated (so far) with 25 million violent excess deaths (from bombs and bullets) or non-violent excess deaths (from deprivation). However this carnage is dwarfed by the mostly non-violent excess deaths (avoidable deaths) associated with First World hegemony. Excess deaths for a country in a given period is the difference between actual deaths and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently governed country with the same demographics. Using UN Population Division demographic data it has been estimated that post-1950 excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen) total 1.3 billion (the World), 1.2 billion (the non-European World) and 0.6 billion (the Muslim World) – with the latter representing a Muslim Holocaust 100 times greater than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million killed) or the “forgotten” WW2 Bengali Holocaust, the man-made Bengal Famine in which Churchill deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death. [2].

As a minor but nevertheless important player in post-war Anglo-American imperialism, White Australia has a major complicity in the 1.3 billion-victim post-1950 Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust. However it gets worse – White Australia (aka Apartheid Australia because of its draconian race-based laws against Indigenous Australians and its diplomatic, legislative and financial support for Apartheid Israel’s ongoing Palestinian Genocide) is a world leader in worsening Climate Genocide. White Australia is the leader in First World commitment to steadily increasing ecocidal, terracidal, greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution that will very likely result in Climate Genocide of 10 billion non-Europeans this century due to unaddressed climate change, this including 6 billion under-5 year old infants, 3 billion Muslims, 2 billion Indians, 0.3 billion Bangladeshis and 0.3 billion Pakistanis. [3].

White Australia is committed to a climate criminal policy of “60% reduction in 2000 GHG pollution by 2050” – in marked contrast to the urging of top climate scientists and analysts for “cut carbon emissions 80% by 2020”. [4-6].

Importantly, Australia is the world’s biggest coal exporter and 92% of its electric power comes from burning fossil fuels. The climate criminal policies of the present pro-war, pro-coal Labor Party Government are essentially consonant with the policies of the pro-war, pro-coal Liberal Party-National Party Coalition (the Nationals being the most troglodytic and Luddite of the three). These extreme right wing parties are collectively known as the Lib-Labs and command about 90% electoral support, with a minority of 10% of Australian voters supporting the anti-war, anti-coal, pro-peace, pro-environment Australians Greens.

Already Australia is a world-leading per capita GHG polluter. As of 2008, “annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution” in units of “tonnes CO2-equivalent per person per year” (2005-2008 data) is 2.2 (India), 5.5 (China), 6.7 (the World), 11 (Europe), 27 (the US) and 30 (Australia; or 54 if Australia’s huge Exported CO2 pollution is included. [5, 7].

Reducing Australia’s 2000 Domestic emissions 60% by 2020 would mean 2050 domestic emissions of 0.6 x 535.3 million tonnes CO2-e (CO2-equiv; GHG pollution including CO2, methane and nitrous oxide (N2O) and expressed in terms of CO2 equivalents) = 321.2 Mt CO2-e (million tonnes CO2-e). However Australia’s projected Exported GHG pollution in 2050 will be 1,318.2 t CO2-e (tonnes CO2-e). According to the UN Population Division Australia’s projected population in 2050 will be 28.0 million. [5].

Accordingly, the Australian Government projection is for a 2050 annual per capita Domestic GHG pollution of 321.2 MtCO2-e/28 million people = 11.5 tonnes CO2-e per person per year – roughly 2 times the current value for China, 5 times that of India, 8 times that of Pakistan and 13 times that of Bangladesh.

However Australia’s projected Domestic plus Exported GHG pollution in 2050 will be (321.2 + 1,318.2) Mt CO2–e/28 million people = 58.6 tonnes CO2-e per person per year, 8.5% greater than its current values and 9 times the present annual per capita GHG pollution for the World, 10 times that of China, 27 times that of India, 39 times that of Pakistan and 65 times that of Bangladesh.

Pro-coal, pro-pollution Australia is essentially committed to business-as–usual (BAU) in the face of the climate emergency and to maintaining its world-leading per capita GHG pollution position. In stark contrast, after the 2009 G8 meeting, the Indian PM Manmohan Singh pledged that India’s per capita CO2 emissions (already one of the World’s lowest) will never exceed the average for Developing Countries. [8-9].

It gets worse. The White Australian Rudd Labor Government has instructed its Treasury officials to model for a “target” concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at between 450 and 550 parts per million CO2-equivalent (i.e. including the GHGs carbon dioxide, CO2, methane, CH4, and nitrous oxide, N2O), this corresponding to about 390-480 ppm CO2 (with atmospheric CO2 concentration currently increasing at 2 ppm per year). [3, 10].

The Rudd Labor Australian Government pledge of 450-550 CO2-e means a minimum atmospheric CO2 concentration of over 400 ppm CO2 within 5 years with this rising to about 500 ppm CO2.

According to Australian Greens Senator Milne:

“450 ppm [CO2-e] gives us a less than even chance of avoiding 2 degrees warming, leading most likely to the complete loss of Arctic summer ice, extinction of polar bears and so many other species in the wild, and potentially setting in train positive feedback loops that could send our climate into an uncontrollable heating cycle.550 ppm [CO2-e] will send us toward 3 degrees warming, destroy the Great Barrier Reef and almost certainly trigger runaway climate change, leading some to say that there is no such thing as stabilisation at 550 ppm. It should not even be being modelled as it is beyond the point where a safe climate for all living creatures, including humanity, can be imagined.” [10].

What do leading scientists say about these White Australia-proposed levels of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere?

According to Australian National University paleoclimate and earth scientist Dr Andrew Glikson:

“The continuing use of the atmosphere as an open sewer for industrial pollution has already added some 305 GtC to the atmosphere together with land clearing and animal-emitted methane. This raised CO2 levels to 387 ppm CO2 to date, leading toward conditions which existed on Earth about 3 million years (Ma) ago (mid-Pliocene), when CO2 levels rose to about 400 ppm, temperatures to about 2–3 degrees C and sea levels by about 25 +/- 12 metres.” [11].

According to top US climate scientist Dr James Hansen and colleagues (2008):

“Stabilization of Arctic sea ice cover requires, to first approximation, restoration of planetary energy balance. Climate models driven by known forcings yield a present planetary energy imbalance of +0.5-1 W/m2. Observed heat increase in the upper 700 m of the ocean confirms the planetary energy imbalance, but observations of the entire ocean are needed for quantification. CO2 amount must be reduced to 325-355 ppm to increase outgoing flux 0.5-1 W/m2, if other forcings are unchanged. A further imbalance reduction, and thus CO2 ~300-325 ppm, may be needed to restore sea ice to its area of 25 years ago.” [12].

Top UK climate scientist Dr James Lovelock FRS has stated the following of the consequences of an atmospheric CO2 concentration of over 500 ppm:

“In Chapter 1 I describe a simple model where the sensitive part of the Earth system is the ocean; as it warms, so the area of the sea that can support the growth of algae grows smaller as it is driven ever closer to the poles, until algal growth ceases. The discontinuity comes because algae in the ocean both pump down carbon dioxide [by photosynthesis] and produce clouds [through cloud-seeding dimethyl sulphide production]. (Algae floating in the ocean actively remove carbon dioxide from the air and use it for growth; we call the process “pumping down” to distinguish it from the passive and reversible removal of carbon dioxide as it dissolves in rain or sea water). The threshold for the failure of the algae is about 500 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, about the same as it is for Greenland’s unstoppable melting.” [13].

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (a top world expert on climate change and coral, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia), re 450 ppm CO2, 2007:

“What we find out is that the threat is much closer than we thought in the past, and in fact the magic number may be 450. When I say ’450′; 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide and we lose them … Lose coral reefs. If you look around Australia today, in fact the world, you find that coral reefs only prosper when you’ve got a certain amount of carbonate ions in the water. The level at which the carbonate ion drops below that level is when you’ve got 450 parts per million, and of course we know that we haven’t actually had that concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for possibly 20 million years, so this does make sense. So once we’ve identified this number, I get the feeling that our politicians, even with their best intentions in Bali, are still flailing around trying to identify the target. And I think that everything, and this goes for not only coral reefs but for rainforest, for the breakdown of the Greenland ice sheet and all of these other issues, 450 is going to be what we must at all costs aim for.” [14].

As outlined above, the Australian Labor Government is committed to polices that will mean an increase in Australia’s already world leading annual per capita Domestic and Exported GHG pollution from 54 tonnes CO2-e per person per year to 59 tonnes CO2-e per person per year – about 9 times the present World average annual per capita GHG pollution.

Back in 1901, Australia’s first PM, racist Edmund Barton, declared that “The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of an Englishman and the Chinaman.” [15].

In 1947 the racist Labor Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, notoriously declared that “Two Wongs do not make a White.” [16].

Now, in the 21st century, the Australian Labor Federal Government is committed to 2050 policy targets that effectively state in relation to permissible per capita GHG pollution that 10 Chinese, 27 Indians, 39 Pakistanis or 65 Bangladeshis are not equivalent to one White Australian.

Further, the Australian Labor Federal Government policy goes well beyond the mere climate racism of “65 Bangladeshis do not equal one White Australian” to what must be described as climate genocide, ecocide and terracide. Thus the atmospheric GHG targets of the Australian Labor Federal Government (generally supported by the conservative Opposition and hence by the 90% of Australians who vote for the Lib-Labs) mean the destruction of Australian and World coral reefs, destruction of the Greenland ice sheet, massive destruction of the phytoplankton of the Oceans together with much of the ocean food chain as well as cloud seeding.

Climate racist, climate criminal, White Australia is overwhelmingly committed to destruction of much of Humanity and the biosphere in the interests of short-term private gain of Australian- and foreign-owned corporate interests who generously fund the egregiously corrupt, dishonest and racist Australian Labor Party (aka the Apartheid Labor Party) and no doubt the other Lib-Lab parties too.

Of course, Australia is not the only climate criminal First World country – it is simply the worst by far of the OECD climate criminals. Indeed the G8 meeting at L’Aquila, Italy, in 2009 was a comprehensive failure that committed the First World to a policy of unspoken Climate Genocide. Thus, according to top UK climate scientist Dr James Lovelock FRS, fewer than 1 billion people will survive this century, this corresponding to the avoidable death this century of 10 billion non-Europeans, with this holocaust including 6 billion infants, 3 billion Muslims (a Muslim Holocaust 500 times bigger than the 5-6 million victim WW2 Jewish Holocaust), 2 billion Indians (more than the 1.8 billion victim Indian Holocaust under the racist British, 1757-1947) , 0.3 billion Bangladeshis (100 times more than the 3 million victim Bengali Holocaust under the US-backed Pakistan Army in 1971) and 0.3 billion Pakistanis. [9].

What can decent people (including decent Australians) do to protect themselves, their loved ones, Humanity and the very biosphere of Planet Earth from the climate racist, climate criminal, pro-coal Australian Libs-Labs?

Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Decent people must urgently act by (a) informing others about the worsening, Australia-lead Climate Genocide and (b) urging application of Sanctions, Boycotts, Green Tariffs, reparations demands and criminal prosecutions before the International Criminal Court (ICC) to bring to heel all of the climate criminals, most notably climate racist White Australia and its climate criminal Anglo-American associates, who are knowingly threatening the non-European World with Climate Genocide. [17].

Photo credit: MK Media Productions

Tamara Stark, Communications Director at Greenpeace in the UK, writes this spot on blog post about the environmental “China bashing” in the international media.

“Having spent the last three years living in China, I and all of my Chinese colleagues became somewhat accustomed to what we referred to as “China bashing” by some of the international media. You know the sort of thing: the over-the-top, almost hysterical cry of “China’s eating up all the world’s resources!” Since China is now one of the world’s largest manufacturing centres, the claim was applied to almost anything – timber, coal, or even the cobalt used to make our cell phone batteries. To a certain degree, therefore, there is a kernel – but not much more – of truth to the claim.”

Stark highlights the fact that most of the production that generates the waste and pollution in China comes from factories (many owned by Western corporations) producing products intended for and consumed by the Western markets. We in the West have outsourced our dirty factories to (often) un-democratic countries with shameless low wages and with a political and justice system that lacks even mediocre environmental regulations. So why is the mainstream media blaming these developing countries for the increasing amount of greenhouse gas emissions when it is actually our consumption that is the root of the problem?

Stark continues by adding that China is currently investing more in renewable energy than some Western countries:

“For example, take their investment in renewable energy. Every year, there is more wind power capacity installed in China than the UK has installed in its entire history. The UK is currently near the bottom of the EU in terms of investment, only just managing to top Malta and Luxembourg. Surely a G8 country should be doing better than this?”

It unfortunately seems that the UK will lose its only wind turbine factory (and over 600 people will lose their jobs) due to a lack of much-needed investment in the green energy sector in favour of dirty fossil fuels such as coal and nuclear energy instead. While that happens in Europe the leaders of China are investing $12.6 million every hour to green their economy. China is actually investing twice as much as USA to green the economy, create jobs for the future and stop man-made climate-change. And this despite the fact that the US economy is 1.5 times as large as China’s.

When a single power plant in West Yorkshire in Great Britain will produce more CO2 every year than all the 139 million people combined living in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique. And when the West’s environmental footprint is several times higher than those in China who are we to be the ones pointing fingers?

We should never forget that it is we in the developed world that has created this global environmental problem. We are the ones responsible. Trying to claim otherwise is just disgusting.

“Earlier this year, Bono and I spoke about the intersection between the extreme poverty in the developing world – especially in Africa – and the climate crisis. It is impossible to solve one of these issues without dealing with the other (Gore, 2008)”.

So if we are to solve the equality in the world, our uneven development and environmental problems we just can’t work on one of them. They are all connected and thus we have to deal with all of them at once.

The future is in the past

Could we really call today’s capitalist system based on a never-ending and unsustainable consumption as development? Why does one count the consumption of our nature as an income, as something free to use whenever and how we feel for it? The current global development is uneven, lacks equality and comes with a heavy environmental price. And as we today face a climate and ecological crisis beyond our wildest dreams we can see that the crisis and our problems have roots not just in our modern industrial and fossil burning society, but also in ancient Rome and in our colonial history.

You know how the old saying goes: “it was better before”. But was it? Just as John Bellamy Foster writes in The Vulnerable Planet “many of our fundamental ecological problems date back to preindustrial times.” The early civilizations were largely made up of agriculture economies and so they were vulnerable to ecological collapse from the degradation of soil. The Sumerian, Indus valley, Greek, Phoenician, Mayan and Roman societies all failed, as historical and archaeological evidence shows, in part to ecological factors (Foster, 1999: 36-37).

The Romans made huge impacts on their surrounding environment, which can still be seen today. Examples are deforestation, depletion of natural resources, loss of wildlife and pollution from cities and industries. Abandoned olive presses from the Roman Empire can be found in North Africa – where once trees and olives flourished there is now just deserts. The Roman smelting industries polluted the surrounding environments and poisoned its workers with lead, mercury and arsenic. Studies of the Greenland ice cap even show dramatic increases of lead in the atmosphere during the Roman era. Donald Hughes notes in Rethinking Environmental History, that the awful health and environmental conditions must have “favoured” the plague and helped it spread across the Mediterranean (Hughes, 2007: 27, 33, 35-37).

The collapse of the old civilizations can be seen as examples of what is happening today. You can think of the current world as a bigger and more advanced version of the Roman or Mayan empires. The environmental problems we face today is a mixture of old and new problems such as toxic and radioactive waste into waterways, deforestation in light of increased palm oil farming, dead seabed’s due to increased discharge of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous, species extinction on a much larger scale etc. Instead of just destroying local areas of the planet we are now in the business of global destruction. The early civilizations lacked proper understanding of economic and environmental policies, but we have that knowledge. And as our future is decided on our actions in the past we must not follow in the same direction as older and failed civilizations have. I wouldn’t blame technology for our ecological problems. And I don’t believe that if we reject our modern world we can reach ecological harmony. The root to our problem lies in our social systems, and so we need to basically reformulate and reorganize our society in order for a more sustainable and ecological friendly world to emerge (Foster, 1999: 35-36).

The rise of the North

Economies and development are in the end “constrained by ecological conditions”. As deforestation, “agriculture intensification” and other environmental problems contributed to the fall of the Roman and Greek civilizations even the people in ancient Rome made this connection (Hughes, 2007: 4, 12). But something that earlier was confined to more local areas of the world have due to globalization become global problems. As Clive Ponting shows, the uneven development and global problems we face today comes from our colonial history and the rise of Europe, which “drastically affected a whole range of ecosystems” and “reshaped the relationships between different regions” (Ponting, 1991: 194). The rise and expansion of Europe created, what we today call the Third World or Global South, and literally forced the world into a single system and world economy dominated by the “North”.

European powers such as Portugal, Spain and Great Britain created colonies and plantations around the world so that they could grow crops for their “luxury market” and for industrial needs during the 15th and the 18th century. These were crops, such as sugar cane and tobacco, which for some reason could not be grown in Europe. This was either because the climate was not suitable or they missed cheap labour, mainly in form of slaves, convicts or indentured servants (Ponting, 1991: 194-195, 198 also Foster 1999). The territories under colonial ruling, in the Canary Islands, Cuba, Peru, Australia, Brazil, Hawaii etc, were exploited and used just to benefit the home economy. The crops were only a selected few and were mainly grown on huge plantations owned and managed by Europeans which took up the best lands and displaced local farmers to smaller and less fertile grounds. The Europeans in control was only a tiny fraction of the total population and wanted others to do the manual work as they regarded the job done on the plantations as “degrading”. These “others” were usually slaves from places like Africa (Ponting, 1991: 196).

When slavery later was abolished in the 19th century the colonial powers used cheap indentured labour from countries such as India and China (Ponting, 1991: 196, 199). Different laws and taxes were also introduced by the Europeans, such as the agrarian land law introduced in Indonesia by the Dutch in 1870, which gave them complete control of all unused land (Ponting, 1991: 201), and the British hut and poll taxes in East Africa (Ponting, 1991: 203). These different taxes and laws resulted in that the local farmers had to work and grow the colonials “cash crops” to earn money. Or it created a similar “peculiar mixed system that was neither a true plantation nor a smallholding” where the farmers growing the crop “were neither slaves, as on islands such as Jamaica, nor landless labours as in Puerto Rico” but still forced to grow an particular crop for the Europeans (Ponting, 1991: 201). Also, import duties were introduced to pay for the costs for goods to Africans, but goods intended for the European farmers in Africa where exempted. By 1930 the African economy had been transformed and integrated into the international economy controlled by the white Europeans and increasingly the Americans (Ponting, 1991: 204).

The legacy of imperialism

Even after the countries previously under colonial rule achieved political independence and sovereignty not much changed. They were, and still are, under the influence of the Western world, their former colonial rulers. The plantations are still there and a majority of them still produced one single crop or resource. But now they were managed by large multinational corporations and companies such as the Firestone Rubber Company, who owned a 127,000 acres large plantation in Liberia, and the United Fruit Company (Ponting, 1991: 206, 212). It did not matter if the companies were disposed of the land and plantations they previously had owned or by being nationalised. The multinational corporations still dominated the processing and manufacturing of the raw commodities. And due to the overwhelming financial and economic powers the western countries had gained the trade was still in their favour. For example, the companies leave out many of the countries from the more profitable parts by not building any smelters or processing plants. Instead they export the raw commodities to their own home market where the final product can be worth many times more when it’s been refined. Another example is that the “North” around mid-1950 put a tax on already processed timber which meant that the Third World countries must export wood that hasn’t been processed and then import back value-added boards and papers (Ponting, 1991: 214, 216, 218).

In the beginning of the twentieth century Europe and the US had managed to transform former self-sufficient countries in the Third World to countries where the development took the form of providing raw resources and growing a selected few crops, or in some cases just a single crop, for other countries. In one word: monoculture. This in turn brought with it environmental damages to the soil, deforestation and a loss of biodiversity as the crop growing was produced over huge areas. Every year the production of export crops from the Third World grew by three-and-a-half percent while the actual food production for the home market grew much slower than the actual rise in population. This meant that the countries had to import a majority of the food needed. Cuba, Fiji and Tahiti are good examples of this. By 1950 the growing of sugar crops took up 60% of all farmland and consisted of up to 75% of the countries export in Cuba. Because of this Cuba had to import over half of its food. In Fiji during the early 1980’s the sugar was over 80% of all exports while it only employed 20% of the population. And in Tahiti during the 1950’s 75% of the farmland was used to grow crops that were only meant for export (Ponting, 1991: 212-214). James O’Connor argues that the “uncontrolled expansion of monoculture” in Third World countries is the result of uneven development. Brazil and sugar production in the 16th and 17th century, as an example, pushed the country into “deep poverty”, which it has never really recovered from. An example of the devastating effects on the environment uneven development “under the aegis of colonialism and of mindless economic expansion”, as O’Connor puts it, has brought forth was the vast deforestation around the world during the 19th and 20th century (O’Connor, 1989: 4-5).

It is worth noting that Japan was never colonized by the “North” and thus the country was able to be ranked among the other advanced capitalistic states by 1890 (Foster, 1999: 89, 91).

So the former colonial powers have created a world and economic system where the countries in the Third World are bound and intertwined to supply the “North” with crops and other raw commodities (Tabb, 2007: 33). Twenty percent of the total food grown in the world goes from the Third World to the developed and industrialised countries while only 12% goes in the opposite direction. The “South” still exports more food than it imports, even during major periods of hunger and starvation. For example in the famine of 1876-1877 in India wheat was still being exported to the Great Britain (Ponting, 1991: 214). Ponting says that the “North” became developed and received their high material and living standard on the expense of the poor people in the Third World via economic and environmental exploitation with poverty and human suffering as a result (Ponting, 1991: 222-223). O’Connor says that the worst environmental and human disasters “as a rule occur in the Third World” and that the victims “are typically the rural poor”, but also the “oppressed minorities and poor in the First World”, i.e. the West (O’Connor, 1989: 2).And when it comes to climate change it is, unfortunately, the ones that are the least responsible for the climate crisis, primarily the poor people in the Third World, who are the most vulnerable and will be affected the worst from the devastating effects a changing climate will bring (McMichael, 2008: 15).

After the former colonial rulers had left during the end of the 18th and early 19th century and the countries gained independence they did not just face economical or environmental problems but also more deadly ones such as genocides and wars over resources. The norm for many new countries and their leaders after they had gained independence was complete control of the army and the power to intimidate and bully its own people. An example of this is Rwanda. There the Belgians had ruled the country by giving the native minority of Tutsi chief’s superior status and control over the Hutus, a large native group in the country. After the Belgians left the country in 1962 Tutsi dictators were left to rule, which in turn led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of people in the Rwandan genocide in 1994 (Tabb, 2007: 33).

William K. Tabb argues that these dictators and other ruthless leaders are fuelled by easily extracted resources and that this resource extraction still in today’s world continues to “spur extremes of violence and war”. A study by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner in 1997 shows that the higher a country depends on the export of their natural resources slows down the countries growth and that it “significantly and substantially increases the risk of conflict” and civil wars (quoted in Tabb, 2007: 33).

The struggle over oil

And here is where the oil comes in. In today’s world traditional wars where you normally fight for a specific land area are very rare. Instead civil wars over resources have become the standard. Countries rich on oil such as Nigeria, Gabon, Sudan, Congo and Chad have a long history of military dictatorship and coups which have resulted in starvation, diseases and the death of millions of people and the destruction of the local environment. In Angola, for example, millions of people have died in the civil war that was started because of the “wholesale looting” of the countries oil reserve and natural recourses (Tabb, 2007: 34-35). The huge sums of money generated from the valuable resources was sent to banks overseas and almost never found its way to the people of Angola. Today imperialism has taken the form of global organisations such as the World Bank, IMF and the WTO. And as Tabb points out that in these troubled areas where you can find precious resources you will find foreign corporations and the World Bank ready to work with the local leaders for their share of the cut. Global Witness reports that even though Congo Brazzaville is the fourth largest oil producer in Africa it has a debt of over $6.4 billion. This huge debt is a consequence of the “influence peddling and bribery” of the former French state company Elf Aquitaine (cited in Tabb, 2007: 34-35, 40). In the past countries and their governments would be directly involved in these troubled areas. But today they have to some extent been replaced by global organisations and corporations. When it comes to the Iraq war and occupation many corporations and organisations besides the US army is involved. One example is Blackwater Worldwide, a private military company which has played a substantial role as a contractor for the US government in Iraq.

As peak oil (also called Hubbert’s peak) comes closer and world oil demands and prices soar – the demand grew by 1.5% in 2002, 1.9% in 2003 and 3.7% in 2004 (Tabb, 2007: 39) – the former “Anglo-American petroleum dominance” in the world is loosing ground to state-controlled producers such as Kuwait Petroleum, Abu Dhabi National Oil, Saudi Aramco and Sonatrach, but also from Western oil producers such as StatoilHydro. These state-controlled companies holds “at least half of the world’s proven” reserves and a quarter of current oil production. Instead of investing into alternative and renewable energy sources to combat the high energy costs and becoming energy independent USA and Great Britain have panicked and is using “force to reassert dominance” via “state terror and coercion” in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately these occupations and resource wars have failed and instead of creating stable governments it has resulted in more terrorism, the alienation of the rest of the world and an increasing cost of oil (Tabb, 2007: 38-40).

But it is not just in the Middle East there is an energy struggle going on. Latin America currently supplies more oil to the US than the Middle East does (Davis, 2004: 2). And Third World countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia, both oil rich nations, have in recent years tried to stand up against the North’s energy and political influence. Venezuela and its democratically elected leader Hugo Chavez has increased the nations stake in major energy projects from 40% to 60% in the countries oil company Petroleos de Venezuela. Norway’s share in StatoilHydro is for example about 62% (Wikipedia.org). And instead of going the same path as Congo Brazzaville, Hugo Chavez has used the money generated from his country’s oil to raise his people’s living standard. The President of Bolivia, Evo Morales have nationalised the countries energy industry, similar to what is happening in Venezuela. For this Evo Morales have gained support back home with an approval rating of 80%. This can be compared to George Bush’s own 33% approval rating back home in USA. For this, both Morales and Chavez have been criticized by the “North” for their “weak commitment to democracy” (Tabb, 2007: 39-40).

In Columbia leftwing ELN guerrillas are threatening the oilfields and pipelines operated by the US-based company Occidental Petroleum. That is why Special Forces, the CIA and private security contractors from the US is currently involved in an “an ongoing reign of terror” called “Operation Red Moon” in the Arauca province. T. Christian Miller, reporting in the Los Angeles Times, says that the consequence has been that “mass arrests of politicians and union leaders have become common. Refugees fleeing combat have streamed into local cities. And killings have soared as right-wing paramilitaries have targeted leftwing critics” (quoted in Davis, 2004: 2).

And in the Straits of Malacca, a narrow passage of East Asia’s oil supply, the Malaysian foreign minister have complained that USA is “exaggerating the threat of terrorist piracy” to justify deploying military forces there (Davis, 2004: 2).

Climate change

Because our development and “global market infrastructure” is based almost solely on the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal, the earth is warming up and our climate is changing. And as we stand in front of the biggest environmental crisis ever, namely man-made climate change, our efforts on slowing down the devastating effects can scuttle because of our worlds uneven development.

James Lovelock, known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, has said that he believes that climate change is now irreversible. He predicts that the major part of the humans, more than six billion people, will get wiped out of the face of the earth due to wars, starvation, epidemics and chaos during the rest of the century due to the effects of a changing climate. Lovelock estimates that by year 2100 there will only be around 500 millions people left who struggles to survive on the few remaining liveable places on earth: Scandinavia, Canada and Iceland (Goodell, 2007). Lovelock writes that:

“Gaia, the living Earth, is old and not as strong as she was two billion years ago. She struggles to keep the Earth cool enough for her myriad forms of life against the ineluctable increase of the sun’s heat. But to add to her difficulties, one of those forms of life, humans, disputatious tribal animals with dreams of conquest even of other planets, has tried to rule the Earth for their own benefit alone. With breathtaking insolence they have taken the stores of carbon that Gaia buried to keep oxygen at its proper level and burnt them. In so doing they have usurped Gaia’s authority and thwarted her obligation to keep the planet fit for life; they thought only of their own comfort and convenience. (quoted in Lovelock, 2006: 146)”

Gore says that our “overdependence” on fossil fuels and our weak policies on climate change show what can happen “when reason is replaced by the influence of wealth and power” (Gore, 2007: 191). Since the “market” has become one with development, McMichael argues, we have responded to this climate crisis by framing “solutions to climate change in market terms”. This, McMichael warns, results in “commodification of the ecological commons through green market solutions such as carbon trading, emission offsets, and biofuels, to sustain, rather than question, current trajectories of accumulation and consumption”. McMichael says that because the world is already now warming up much faster than what the IPCC’s “conservative” numbers estimated and that the world’s resources are finite and “deeply unequal”, the idea of the green growth is an “oxymoron”. McMichael argues that the fog of “promises of market prosperity” has covered the effects and impacts of development on our climate, “let alone be recognized for the catastrophe that it already is”, warning that it “will remain so long as market solutions prevail”. The world is slowly realising this. The 2007/2008 Human Development Report says that “climate change is the defining human development issue of our generation”. And the eight Conference of Parties (COP8) of the UNFCCC in Dehli declared that “climate change is a serious risk to poverty reduction and threatens to undo decades of development efforts” (McMichael, 2008: 1-2).

When it comes to responsibility for the current climate crisis the world is just as uneven and unequal. The “North”, i.e. the West, is responsible for about 80% of the worlds CO2 increase. An average person living in Great Britain will in only 11 days emit as much CO2 as an average person in Bangladesh will during a whole year. And just a single power plant in West Yorkshire in Great Britain will produce more CO2 every year than all the 139 million people combined living in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique (McMichael, 2008: 2). But still, in light of these unequal differences USA demands that they won’t lower their emissions before the Third World countries does. And this is exactly why the current climate talks aren’t getting anywhere.

The old colonial past and today’s imperialism in the shape of the World Bank, IMF and the WTO (Tabb, 2007: 40) has created a rift between the “North” and the “South” and their relationships today. Or as George Monbiot puts it: “Rich countries once used gunboats to seize food. Now they use trade deals” (The Guardian, Tuesday August 26 2008). This rift takes the form in expression of criticisms such as the comment from the Argentinean President Kirchner who said that “the North should meet its ‘environmental debts’ just as it demands the “South” meet its ‘financial debts’”. Or Brazil’s President Lula who said in February 2007 that “the wealthy countries are very smart, approving protocols, holding big speeches on the need to avoid deforestation, but they already deforested everything” (Philip McMichael, 2008: 3-4). You can say that the “de-localization” of crop growing to countries in the Third World with low wages and a weak environmental system was done to conserve the environment in Europe (McMichael, 2005: 284).

An example of how the “North” has been able to get away easily from their climate and ecological responsibilities is Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a part of something that Philip McMichael calls “market environmentalism”. CDM encourages Western countries to meet their very own reduction targets, not by reducing their CO2 emitting sources back home, but by investing in cheap solutions in the “South” (McMichael, 2008: 6, 16). The European Union agreed on a new climate deal during the end days of the 2008 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznań, which was held during December 1-12. The EU promised that they will cut their emissions with 20% by 2020. But the actual emission cuts could end up being as little as 4% by 2020 (Black, BBC News, 2008). That is because of special exemptions for dirty industries in Europe as well as allowing cheap emission cuts overseas to be counted to the EU total (WWF, 2008). These emission cuts done overseas will make it easier for us in the “North” to reduce ‘our’ emissions but harder for the developing countries in the “South” to reduce theirs. Monbiot calls this “carbon colonialism, in which Europe picks the low-hanging fruit in developing countries, leaving them with much tougher choices later on” (The Guardian, Friday 12 December 2008).

Roberts and Parks argue (quoted in McMichael, 2008: 3) that

“when powerful states disregard weaker states’ position in the international division of labor in areas where they possess structural power, they run a high risk of weaker states ‘reciprocating’ in policy areas where they possess more bargaining leverage. The issue of global climate change – which itself is characterized by tremendous inequality in vulnerability, responsibility, and mitigation – can therefore not be viewed, analyzed, or responded to in isolation from the larger crisis of global inequality.”

Robert and Parks also list three points from where this “rift” and “mistrust” comes from: 1) Wasteful Western consumption, 2) A state’s ability for environmental reforms is a function of the state’s position in the international scene of labour, and 3) The West’s approach to more sustainable and environmental issues will hinder the “South” from their economic development. John Rapley argues that we in the West must “probably have to bear the expense of environmental adjustment”, because if we don’t the countries in the Third World will continue to take advantage of cheap and CO2 polluting technologies. If we don’t manage to get away from this rift between “North” and “South”, developed and underdeveloped, we will never be able to agree on any lasting climate policies that will be powerful enough to combat climate change and its devastating effects (McMichael, 2008: 3-5).

What development and for whom?

In the beginning I asked if we really could call our current capitalistic system for development. But, what should be developed and for whom? McMichael lists two different forms of development: food security through the global market, and its alternative: food sovereignty.

The privatization of food security through the global market was constructed in 1986-1994 during the Uruguay Round, a forerunner to the WTO’s agreement on Agriculture in 1995. This agreement means that nations no longer have the right to independent and sustainable food within its borders. Instead of letting the producers and consumers manage and decide over the food system it puts corporations and the demands of the global market in control of it. McMichael calls this the corporate food regime, and says that the only benefactors of this “political construct” are about 15% the world’s population.

Food sovereignty is an alternative way to reach food security. The concept of this idea was put forward by Via Campesina, an international movement of mainly farmers, during the World Food Summit in 1996. Simply put: food sovereignty lets people and nations decide and define their own food and agriculture production. Food sovereignty does not rule out trade, instead it creates a more sustainable and self reliant trade between nations (McMichael, 2004: 277-278 and McMichael, 2005: 269-270, 281, 290-291).

Capitalism destroys and divides

As we know, capitalism is all about profit. The higher the profit is, the higher the growth rate will in theory be, which in turn leads to a higher rate of depletion of various recourses which ultimately leads to a higher rate of pollution (O’Connor, 1989: 11). At the end of capitalism there is environmental destruction.

An example on what kind of effects capitalism can have is the current financial crisis in the auto industry. The auto giants, such as GM, Ford and Chrysler, have for years in their race for short-sighted economic gains resisted and done everything in their powers to stop stronger compulsory MPG and CO2 emission standards. They have even denied climate change and their promises that they could cut their greenhouse gases voluntarily have all failed. As a result the average car sold in the US today is less efficient than the Model T Ford from 1908 (The Guardian, Tuesday 7 October 2008). Why? Because as Henry Ford II once explained: “minicars make miniprofits”. And like John Z. DeLorean, former GM executive, have said:

“When we should have been planning switches to smaller, more fuel-efficient, lighter cars in the late 1960s in response to a growing demand in the marketplace, GM management refused because ‘we make more money on big cars’ “(quoted in Foster, 1999: 124).

And with help from the US government, Standard Oil and Firestone Tire these auto companies deliberately dismantled earlier mass transportation system in the US during the 1930s to the 1950s. During most of the twentieth century the US government decreased funding for public transportation while they wastefully poured money into highways in an effort to increase the corporate profits that comes with private motoring. While this was happening the auto companies bought up electric streetcar lines and converted them to busses. This is today known as “the Great American streetcar scandal”, “General Motors streetcar conspiracy” or “the National City Lines conspiracy” (Wikipedia.org). Between 1936 and 1955 the number of electric streetcar lines had dropped from around 40000 to 5000 in the US as a result. GM also used it’s nearly monopolistic control over the bus and locomotive market to make sure that public transportation kept loosing ground to private motoring. And so with devastating effects for the environment, but also in a technology sense, USA today have to rely on private motoring for 90% of all ground transportation of goods and people, which is more than any other country in the world. One can’t defend these actions by claiming they did not know about the effects. Bradford Snell, a U.S. government attorney, once stated in a famous report to a US Senate committee that: “motor vehicle travel is possibly the most inefficient method of transportation devised by modern man” (Foster, 1999: 114-116, 124).

John Bellamy Foster argues that capitalism has had “overwhelmingly negative results” for our planet (Foster, 1999: 32). For example, the commercial trade, i.e. capitalism, in fur has led to the destruction of entire ecosystem and an enormous and never before seen slaughter of wildlife. Some of the animals worst affected by the fur-trade during the 16th and 17th century was beavers, martens, seals, bears, raccoons etc. Between 1797 and 1803 on the island of Mas Afuera in the Juan Fernandez Islands, off the coast off Chile, over 3 million seals were killed for their fur. In the early 19th century six million southern fur seals were clubbed to death resulting in the nearly extinction of fur seals in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean (Foster, 1999: 42-43).

Capitalism doesn’t just result in environmental destruction and resource depletion but it also divides people. A fine example of this is the memorandum from Lawrence Summers. On December 12, 1991, Lawrence Summers, the chief economist for the World Bank, wrote an internal memo that was leaked to the British publication the Economist on February 8, 1992. In it he says that the World Bank should be “encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]”, and that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable”. He also writes that “the demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity” (quoted in Foster, 2002: 60-61). In fewer words: Summers says that people in the Third World are worth less than people in the North, and thus they could be exploited more by the capitalistic world system. But it’s not just in the Third World that capitalism takes the form as environmental racism. In Los Angeles over 70% of African Americans and 50% of Latinos live in areas with the highest amount of air pollution. This can be compared to the 34% of white people living in the same areas (Foster, 1999: 138).

Karl Marx came up with the term “metabolic rift” to explain the rift capitalism have created between social systems and natural systems. This rift, he claimed, led to ecological crisis and the exploitation of the environment. As people moved into cities they lost the contact with nature, and thus they became less likely to consider what the best for the environment was, and how their actions and decisions affected it (McMichael, 2008: 11 and Foster, 1999: 63-64). Marx also noted that as the income for the workers in the cities increased companies (capitalists) searched for cheaper workers outside of the city (Moore, 2000: 136-137). Today when half of the world’s people live in cities this is happening on a much larger and more global scale. More people than ever have lost the direct contact with nature (Satterthwaite, in the Guardian 2007). And instead of companies and corporations looking for cheaper workers in the countryside they now look outside the nation’s borders, mainly in Third World countries.

When it comes to climate change McMichael says that the “only sound solution” is by basically reformulating the generally accepted perspective of development. But he warns that resistance, for what science says needs to be done to tackle the climate crisis, will come from “corporate interests”, “politicians with short-time horizons” but also from strong talks “of neo-liberalism that represents market solutions as commonsense” (McMichael, 2008: 14). He concludes that the “de-carbonization of the material economy will require substantial de-commodification to establish sustainable development, which in turn means the development subject would no longer be the high-mass consumer, but a politically-mobilized social and ecological steward”. And that this time the goal for the “North” is not just to supply and “secure” its home markets with valuable raw materials and other commodities. Now it’s also about supplying the Third World with “environmental repair or caretaker services” to be able to lessen the damages and problems that the system itself has created (McMichael, 2008: 16-17).

Immanuel Wallerstein says that he is “relentlessly pessimistic” on how sustainable development could be possible under capitalism (Hornborg, 2007: 22-23). He also says that we are “in the middle of a transition” away from capitalism to something else. But what that is and if it will be better or worse he do not know. “The outcome will be decided by the political activity of everyone now and in the next twenty-five to fifty years”, he writes (Wallerstein, 2007: 384-385).

Hopefully. Another world is possible.

“We’ve raised concerns for years about primates being in peril, but now we have solid data to show the situation is far more severe than we imagined,” said Russell A. Mittermeier, president of Conservation International (CI) and the longtime chairman of the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Primate Specialist Group. “Tropical forest destruction has always been the main cause, but now it appears that hunting is just as serious a threat in some areas, even where the habitat is still quite intact. In many places, primates are quite literally being eaten to extinction.”

The new analysis reveals that:

• Over 70% of Asian primates are threatened with extinction, and at least two dozen taxa are Critically Endangered.
• Virtually all gibbons are threatened with extinction — and one of the rarest subspecies, the Yunnan white-handed gibbon, may already be extinct.
• All great apes — all gorillas, all chimpanzees, all orangutans, all bonobos — are either Endangered or Critically Endangered.
• Across all primate taxa, a full 48% are threatened — nearly half of all primates, in harm’s way and likely to go extinct in our own lifetime.

And just in time for the release of this depressing report the Associated Press reports that President George Bush is “proposing changes that would allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether subdivisions, dams, highways and other projects have the potential to harm endangered animals and plants.”

According to the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report Synthesis Report, unaddressed CO2 pollution and global warming will have a devastating effect on global malnutrition and poverty (see: http://www.ipcc.ch and see http://green-blog.org). According the Professor David Pimentel (2004) of Cornell University, New York, global malnutrition and poverty will be an “unimaginable” problem by 2054 (see: http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Feb04/AAAS.pimentel.hrs.html ), already pollution of the soil, water and air kills about 40% of the world’s population and 57% of the world’s population of 6.5 billion is already malnourished (see: http://news.cornell.edu/…/moreDiseases.sl.html).

Already 16 million people due avoidably each year (9.6 million being under-5 year old infants) from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease on a Spaceship Earth dominated by a profligate and unresponsive First World (see “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950“, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007) – and this is increasingly being impacted by climate change through mega-delta inundation by storm surges, drought and increased temperature.

The worst offenders are the US, Canada and Australia as can be seen from this comparison of “annual per capita fossil fuel-derived carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution” (2004 data from the US Energy Information Administration) in tonnes CO2/person which is 19.2 (for Australia; 40 if you include Australia’s coal exports), 19.7 (the US), 18.4 (Canada), 9.9 (Japan), 4.2 (the World), 3.6 (China), 1.0 ( India) and 0.25 (for Bangladesh) (see “Climate Emergency, Sustainability Emergency“).

According to Sir Nicholas Stern as quoted by the Guardian (2007): “[annual average CO2] emissions a head are more than 20 tonnes each year, with European citizens producing 10-15 tonnes each. In China it is about five tonnes, in India about one, and in Africa less than one tonne each” (see: http://guardian.co.uk/…/climatechange.carbonemissions).

However the problems of Third World countries are now being impacted by “peak oil” and the biofuel perversion of using food to drive cars and trucks in a starving world. Indeed in the ultimate obscenity Richard Branson’s Virgin airline has recently used biofuel to partly fuel a flight from London to Amsterdam, an act that drew critical condemnation from environmentalists (see: http://abc.net.au/…/stories/2008/02/25/2171511.htm). In short, diversion of agricultural land for biofuel has three major problems. Biofuel (A) drives up the world price of food in a global marketplace; (B) can be associated with a huge “carbon debt” from release of soil carbon, whether from ploughed savannah or from deforested land; and (C) is currently associated with huge ecosystem damage. Let us consider these 3 problems in succession .

(A). Biofuel perversion is driving up global food prices

The United States is currently using about 9% of its wheat, 25% of its corn and about 15% of its grain in general to produce biofuel. The United Kingdom (UK) has committed to large increases in the use of biofuels over coming decades, has recently announced subsidies for biofuel and supports the European Commission (EU) target requiring 10 per cent of petrol station fuel to be plant-derived biofuel within 12 years. However the huge and intrinsically genocidal US diversion of 15% of its grain crop to biofuel production has had a huge impact already on soaring global food prices – the world is already facing a global food crisis with alarm being expressed by UN, FAO and other scientific experts. Simple Google searches for “global food crisis”, ”world food price crisis” and related phrases reveals massive current concerns.

The UK Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor John Beddington CMG, FRS (Professor of Applied Population Biology at Imperial College, London.) has described the devastating potential of food shortages as an “elephant in the room” problem commensurate with that from climate change and warns that biofuel diversion (e.g. for canola oil- or palm oil-derived biodiesel and grain- or sugar-derived ethanol) is threatening world food production and the lives of “billions” (see: http://theaustralian.news.com.au/….html).

Recently Finance Indian Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has said that it is “outrageous” that developed countries are turning food crops into biofuels while billions of people in the developing countries are living on the edge and trying to cope with escalating food prices (see: BBC News).

Numerous Mainstream media reports are describing how we now have a global food crisis with the spectre of widespread famine due to escalating grain and food prices – in a harsh, globalized market place those that cannot afford to buy food will simply starve unless rescued. Yet the UN and FAO are finding it acutely difficult to rescue such people. These food price rises in turn are because of the huge US and indeed Western biofuel diversion, complicated by climate change (impacting on drought in Australia and Canada), weather (e.g. too much rain the US), hedging speculation and diversion for livestock production.

The New York Times has recently reported that “rising prices and a growing fear of scarcity have prompted some of the world’s largest rice producers to announce drastic limits on the amount of rice they export. The price of rice, a staple in the diets of nearly half the world’s population, has almost DOUBLED on international markets in the last three months. That has pinched the budgets of millions of poor Asians and raised fears of civil unrest” (New York Times, March 29, 2008 “High rice cost raising fears of Asia unrest”).

There have been food riots over food prices recently in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. Rice export bans by rice-exporting nations (Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt and India) have raised world rice prices even more (see: http://nytimes.com/…/29rice.html).

The price of a wheat flour-based “roti” in Pakistan has doubled in the last year and food scarcity is of major concern to the UN and UN Agencies such as FAO (see “2008 – the Year of Global Food Crisis”) .

For an ALARMING graph of world food and wheat prices in recent years see the following report by Australian economists showing that the price of wheat in US dollars has DOUBLED in the last year: http://efic.gov.au. Part of this is due to the falling value of the US dollar but the alarming message is clear.

These food price rises are fuelled by the huge US and indeed Western (UK, EU) biofuel diversion PLUS Greenhouse Gas (GHG) pollution-driven climate change (impacting on drought e.g. in Australia and Canada), weather (e.g. too much rain in the US), hedging investor speculation and diversion of food for livestock production for “rich” people who can afford it (not just in the West but also in the burgeoning Asian economies of China and India).

(B). Biofuel production is currently associated with huge CO2 pollution

We live in a World in which “money buys truth” and public discussion is dominated by lies, spin and slies (spin-based untruth). A devastating “slie” is that biofuels are supposedly “green” because the CO2 deriving from biofuel combustion is cancelled out by the CO2 sequestered by solar energy-driven photosynthesis. However this facile analysis ignores the release of carbon from the soil due to ploughing; loss of CO2 sequestration as a result of de-forestation; and other CO2-pollution inputs into biofuel production such as fertilizer manufacture, transport and mechanical agriculture.

Two major studies by US scientists and published in the prestigious US scientific journal Science have revealed the huge “carbon debt” associated with mainstream agricultural production of biofuels.

Timothy Searchinger and colleagues (“Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change”, Science 29 February 2008, Vol. 319. no. 5867, pp. 1238 – 1240) have found the following:

“Most prior studies have found that substituting biofuels for gasoline will reduce greenhouse gases because biofuels sequester carbon through the growth of the feedstock. These analyses have failed to count the carbon emissions that occur as farmers worldwide respond to higher prices and convert forest and grassland to new cropland to replace the grain (or cropland) diverted to biofuels. By 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.”

Joseph Fargione and colleagues (“Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt”, Science 29 February 2008, Vol. 319. no. 5867, pp. 1235 – 1238) have made even more dramatic findings:

“Increasing energy use, climate change, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels make switching to low-carbon fuels a high priority. Biofuels are a potential low-carbon energy source, but whether biofuels offer carbon savings depends on how they are produced. Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce food crop–based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a “biofuel carbon debt” by releasing 17 to 420 times more CO2 than the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions that these biofuels would provide by displacing fossil fuels. In contrast, biofuels made from waste biomass or from biomass grown on degraded and abandoned agricultural lands planted with perennials incur little or no carbon debt and can offer immediate and sustained GHG advantages.”

Biofuels can be renewable if derived from biomass from waste land e.g. through gasification of biomass to carbon monoxide (CO ) and hydrogen (H2) (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasification) and then subsequent Fischer-Tropsch catalytic conversion to hydrocarbons (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_synthesis) or from oils from growth of prokaryotic organisms (cyanobacteria or blue-green algae) or eukaryotic organisms (green and red algae) (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel).

However in the context of horrendous global poverty, a major decline in grain production, huge increases in grain price and increasing diversion of grain for biofuel generation (see: http://www.fas.usda.gov/grain/circular/2006/05-06/graintoc.htm), current means of biofuel production from human foods (sugar- and grain-derived ethanol, palm oil-, canola- and other oil-derived biodiesel) is a perversion and a crime against humanity, the more so when alternative cheap, efficient renewable energy options are technically already available (e.g. solar energy-based hydrogen-driven transport).

(C ). Biofuel production is devastating the biosphere

As outlined in (b) above, biofuel production is increasing CO2 pollution. The US Energy Information Administration gives a year-by-year summary of fossil fuel-derived CO2 pollution for every country in the world (see: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/iea/carbon.html ). However greenhouse gas pollution (methane, CH4, nitrous oxide, N2O, and carbon dioxide, CO2) comes not just from burning hydrocarbons and coal but also from land use – specifically, agriculture, vegetative decomposition and animal husbandry. A 2000 list of countries by greenhouse gas emissions per capita provides data with and without this land use component (see: Wikipedia). Land use contributes about 20% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Thus out of 185 countries my own country Australia ranked 9th worst (with land use change) and 5th (without land use change). The tonnes of “CO2 equivalent” per person per year were 25.9 (with) and 25.6 (without land use change) for Australia, indicating the preponderant importance of fossil fuel burning to Australia’s “score”. However the land use component is very large for de-foresting countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Deforestation contributes about 15-20% of annual CO2 pollution in the world. Yet according to Sir Nicholas Stern: “For $10-15bn (£4.8-7.2bn) per year, a programme could be constructed that could stop up to half the deforestation” (see: http://guardian.co.uk/…/).

In addition to playing a vital role in global temperature homeostasis, forest ecosystems are sources for invaluable pharmaceutical resources (see my recent huge reference book: Gideon Polya, “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds. A pharmacological reference guide to sites of action and biological effects”, CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003).

At an even more fundamental level, Balmford et al in the prestigious scientific journal Science (see “Economic reasons for preserving wild nature”) have estimated that for a variety of “biomes” (ecological systems) the total economic value (TEV) is about 50% greater when the resource is used sustainably as opposed to destructive conversion. Further, these scientists have found that the economic benefit from preserving what is left of wild nature is OVER 100 TIMES greater than the cost of preservation.

However over-riding these economic concerns is the fundamental concern over species extinction – the rate of mammal extinction is already one thousand times greater than for the fossil record (see: http://greenfacts.org/…/figure1-8-species-extinctions.htm). We have no right to destroy the irreplaceable biodiversity that is the common property of the world and indeed of the universe.

Conclusion

The world is already seeing the commencement of a re-run – on a possibly 100-fold greater scale – of the man-made World War 2 Bengali Holocaust in which 6-7 million people perished in Bengal and in the adjoining provinces of Assam, Bihar and Orissa under the merciless British “scorched earth policy” when the price of rice doubled and finally doubled again (see: http://open2.net/…/bengalfamine_programme.html). Ten years ago I published a book entitled “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com) in which I described horrendous man-made, market-forces famines in British-ruled India from the 1769-1770 Great Bengal Famine (10 million deaths or one third of the Bengali population) to the World War 2 Bengal Famine (6-7 million deaths in the Bengal region).

These catastrophes have been deliberately erased from British history and from general public perception – leading to the acute danger of History ignored yielding History repeated. My pleas for action to prevent further such catastrophes have fallen on deaf ears. Bengal is now acutely threatened not only from biofuel-driven global food price rises but also from inundation from global-warming-driven sea level rises. I am revising my book for a 2008 second edition that in itself will be a further testament to “History ignored yields History repeated”.

In January 2008 I took part in a BBC radio broadcast about the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (WW2 Bengali Holocaust) that also involved 1998 Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen (Harvard, formerly Cambridge University, UK), Dr Sanjoy Bhattacharya (medical historian, Wellcome Institute, University College London) and other scholars.

I made the following general methodological point at the end of the program: “This isn’t simply an argument about rubbing out history. Scientists can help society through what is called rational risk management. It successively involves A, getting the accurate data. B, doing a scientific analysis. And then C, recognising this, taking action, changing the system, whether it’s a national system or a global system, to avoid a repetition.”

However Professor Amartya Sen concluded the program with the following profound point: “I think the fact that famines happen when they’re so extraordinarily easy to prevent – nothing in the world is easier to prevent – affects me. Being a Bengali I can’t say that it adds especially to that because this seems to me to be a basic human sympathy at seeing suffering all across the world which are completely needless.”

All decent people around the world must speak out to prevent this mounting, NEEDLESS global famine tragedy that is unfolding before our eyes.

Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003). He has just published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com); see also his contribution “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007). He is currently preparing a revised and updated version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a possibly 100-fold greater famine catastrophe (see: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya310308.htm) than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving me, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others).