Over at War is Boring there's a new item about how Lockheed's immensely flawed F-35 will handily trounce an opposing force of Russia's pretty amazing Su-35s.
Apparently there's a computer game you can buy to run this simulation yourself and you can expect consistent results, time after time. Lockheed's wunder plane - overdue, overpriced and underperforming - can wax those Russkie's tails every time.
Unfortunately the fellow who wrote the piece, Tim Robinson, overlooked how contrived the scenario had to be to achieve this remarkable turnaround.
For starters, the American force outnumbered the Russians. It was four Su-35 Sukhois versus four F-35 strike fighters plus supporting electronic warfare aircraft such as AWACS, RC-135 Rivet Joint and, of course, the small armada of tankers that would be needed to support that force.
Folks, it only gets better. It turns out those four F-35s are loaded for bear and nothing else. Each has its two weapon bays stuffed with a pair of British MDMB Meteor air to air missiles, leaving room for nothing else.
In other words, you take the hours required to assemble this package of fighters, tankers and electronic warfare aircraft, launch them from several air bases, get them all formed up somehow knowing that you'll arrive at this time and point in space where you'll find four Russian Su-35s just waiting for you to shoot them down.
This might be plausible if it was the Russians entering our airspace to attack and giving us all the time in the world to assemble and coordinate that defensive armada but that is, of itself, implausible.
It's just as implausible if it is an American aerial armada going into Russian airspace. That's because those tankers and support aircraft are slow and anything but stealthy. They would easily be detected at very long ranges by even basic Russian air defence radars. And, while those American F-35s are supposedly engaged in defeating those Russian Su-35s, the Russians would have a very nice greeting party en route for those big, lumbering converted 60s jetliners in the form of even more fighters and Russia's world-beating long range surface to air missiles.
Which would put those American F-35s in a bind. Do they proceed toward the Russian Su-35s, hoping their giant electronic warfare planes survive long enough for them to launch those Meteor missiles or do they turn and hightail it back to defend their defenceless flying lifelines? Of course once those F-35s begin turning they're no longer stealthy and can be easily picked off by the Russian fighters, each armed with 10-long range and effective missiles. Decisions, decisions.
And even if, for the sake of argument, those F-35s expended their missile loads to successfully take out those Russian fighters, how do they and their tankers and electronic warfare aircraft get out? That's what you could call the "dead meat" segment of the F-35's mission profile. It doesn't have much fuel. It doesn't have supercruise (way too much drag for that). So it can't go fast without fuel-guzzling afterburner which means it can't go very fast very far. Those are limitations the Russians don't have. Their Su-35 carries loads of fuel. It has supercruise. It can go very fast for very long distances, long enough to run down a bunch of fleeing American F-35s fresh out of missiles and fast running out of fuel.
This simulation reminds me of one of those American anti-ballistic missile missle tests where the target flies a predetermined course and all the parameters are preloaded into the test missile. Miracle of miracles, every now and then one of them actually intercepts the target.
Reminds me of what my beloved, late Uncle Shy used to say: "Don't eat that, Charlie, it's horse shit."
Trump can't help himself and today he literally blew himself - and his political aspirations (if he actually held any) to shreds. Apparently smarting from recent remarks by Arizona senator John McCain that Trump had "fired up the crazies" with his tirades against Mexicans and their governments, DT attacked McCain, saying he was no hero, just a "loser" who got shot down over Viet Nam.
That grinding sound you hear is thousands of Republicans sharpening their skinning knives before hunting down Trump.
Like most of the early Boomer kids, I was fascinated by WWII. Many of our dads had come back from the fighting and our basements would have old steamer chests full of treasures - uniforms, medals, the odd bit of ordinance (shhh, keep that to yourself), canteens, gas masks, bayonets and the occasional fighting knife, helmets and, my favourite, that camouflage netting that doubled as a scarf. Neat stuff.
I can remember quite clearly a bus trip when I was probably eight of nine. I began thinking about the Nazis and how the German people could ever have supported such a monstrous movement. Eventually my meanderings led me to a very unsettling thought - could it happen here? Would our society instinctively reject similar appeals to ugly, base instincts? What made us so much better than those Germans?
For years I had to take it for granted that we were made of better stuff than those Germans in the 30s. We would never tolerate that sort of thing, not in North America. Why we had democracy - and cars. Some even had colour TV.
Seasons of faithfully watching Ozzie and Harriet had surely immunized us against such contagions.
Then ensued the civil rights movement and all the excesses it triggered. We watched plenty of it in black and white on the decidedly "small screen". The anger and hatred and fear were palpable, sickening. Racist cops unleashing dogs on peaceful protesters gave way to lines of soldiers with fixed bayonets holding back rabidly furious, menacing crowds of white bigots. As disturbing as that was I also noticed a widespread ambivalence to it among middle class whites in the north. Would Harriet Nelson or Ozzie or Ricky or David sit by and just let that happen? I don't know but I didn't see them joining any marches either.
In VietNam the Americans butchered "gooks" by the thousands. I was at the bar in a pilots' mess once (relaxed dress code) standing beside an American colonel who was just a bit tight. On his flight suit he sported a badge reading "100 Missions Over North Viet Nam" with the image of a F-105 Thud. I started talking with him about his experiences flying combat over there. At one point he decided to tell me a joke: "Why is napalm like Ban deodorant? 'Cause it takes all the worry out of being close." The joke was bad enough. The yuk, yuk that followed it was positively crispy.
Then came 9/11 and the wars on them there "moozlums". Lots of those folks discovered what awaits when America gets up on the wrong side of the bed. Like gooks before them, they were dehumanized in the public conscience. "If you didn't want us wiping out your mud-walled compound and killin' your women and kids, you shouldn't have supported those guys." As though any of them had any choice.
But now America has got this apparently charismatic guy who has the scapegoat game down to a T. This time it's those Mexicans, those diseased, drug-dealin' rapists flooding across the Mexican border with the worst of the lot actually being sent over by the Mexican government itself!
That strain of virulent racism has propelled this bigot to first place in the Republican presidential nomination race. He's got those people whipped up into a frenzy.
Arizona senator, John McCain speaks for many mainstream Republicans when he reveals the contempt in which he holds Donald Trump, the man with the multi-billion dollar narcissistic disorder by which he now is the front runner for the Republican presidential nomination.
“This performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me,” McCain said. “Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.”
“We have a very extreme element within our Republican Party,” McCain said. He then noted that he was personally censured by Arizona Republicans in January of 2014 and has been fighting to push out the extremists in the state G.O.P. ever since. “We did to some degree regain control of the Party.”
But McCain fears that Trump may be reversing those gains. “Now he galvanized them,” McCain said. “He’s really got them activated.”
"He's fired up the crazies." He certainly has but he's just a bit more open, more outspoken than some of his more genteel rivals, the sort that allude to these same things, play on the same instincts only in less outlandish language.
Trump has tapped into a vein of support, enough to propel him past the rest of the pack of admittedly odd Republican nominee contenders. What we don't know is how deep that vein runs, how much ore is in that mine.
It would be horrifying if Trump's campaign doesn't collapse under the weight of his vile rhetoric but, still, I'm back with those same nagging questions that vexed me on that bus ride in the 50s.
Across the west, forest fires are a huge problem this year. The BC government is exploring ways to engage the public in the effort to deter accidental fires. How about this one - impounding cars whose occupants throw cigarette butts out the window?
The B.C. government said in a news release they are considering harsher punishments for careless people who start wildfires, including impounding cars for tossing cigarette butts out of the window.
“We must send a clear message to those that carelessly start wildfires that their behaviour will not be tolerated,” states the release.
“Should we double the fine for failing to extinguish a campfire? Should we ban those who break campfire bans from using our provincial parks? Should we impound the vehicles of those who flick lit cigarette butts from their car windows?”
Firefighter crews in B.C. have responded to 1,083 forest fires this summer, compared to 523 at this time last year. Of those, one-third are human caused, which amounts to 375 fires and more than 48,000 hectares in flames.
“It’s often said that you can’t legislate against stupidity, but if exploring the idea of harsher penalties for careless acts means more people get the message, we must do it.”
The tinder dry conditions and unusually hot summer have lead to the increased risk of forest fires throughout the province.
“Naturally occurring fires from sources like lightning are difficult enough for our dedicated firefighters to handle. If we’re going to continue to ask them to put their lives on the line to keep people and property safe, we need to do everything we can to end behaviours that lead to needless wildfires.”
What is it with kids? You reach a certain point and, suddenly, they want to take over your life. How are you feeling? Are you getting enough of this? Are you doing that? Why don't you think about... (fill in whatever here)? Grrrrrrr.
My eldest child has returned to Vancouver after years studying in Chicago. Those were the good years. Then she came back and, it seems, learned about her land of birth all over again.
Now she's on me about earthquakes, "The Big One." It seems she read an article in The New Yorker and, knowing I subscribe to that magazine, insisted that I read it. Sometimes you give in just because it's easier and you want to save your energy for the big issues that you know are coming.
So I read the article "The Really Big One" (click on the link, you can too).
I don't take this earthquake business lightly. We get reminded every several years or so to take certain precautions. Lots of fresh water to hand. Flats of tinned goods. Dry foods of all descriptions. Batteries and battery powered gadgets. First aid gear. All the things you might need if you have to live without modern services. I've got all that and more. I have all the gear to harvest the bounty of the nearby Pacific. If need be I have what I need to bring in a deer or two. A wood stove for heat and cooking. I'm set, right?
I always figured that, when the Big One hits, the government would get relief to us within a week or ten days. Sure they'll have to respond first to the west coast of the island which will be devastated. A couple of weeks and we'd be pretty much back to normal, or so I thought. Then I read this damned article. It was, in a word, "jarring." Here are some excerpts to show you what I mean.
When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater.
The next full-margin rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone will spell the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent.CREDITILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN; MAP BY ZIGGYMAJ / GETTYThe water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America.
...the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.
The Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended, what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive. Surface waves are slower, lower-frequency waves that move the ground both up and down and side to side: the shaking, starting in earnest.
Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But, lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down: bookshelves, lamps, computers, cannisters of flour in the pantry. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over. Water heaters will fall and smash interior gas lines. Houses that are not bolted to their foundations will slide off—or, rather, they will stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations, together with the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoored on the undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.
Certain disasters stem from many small problems conspiring to cause one very large problem. For want of a nail, the war was lost; for fifteen independently insignificant errors, the jetliner was lost. Subduction-zone earthquakes operate on the opposite principle: one enormous problem causes many other enormous problems. The shaking from the Cascadia quake will set off landslides throughout the region—up to thirty thousand of them in Seattle alone, the city’s emergency-management office estimates. It will also induce a process called liquefaction, whereby seemingly solid ground starts behaving like a liquid, to the detriment of anything on top of it. Fifteen per cent of Seattle is built on liquefiable land, including seventeen day-care centers and the homes of some thirty-four thousand five hundred people. So is Oregon’s critical energy-infrastructure hub, a six-mile stretch of Portland through which flows ninety per cent of the state’s liquid fuel and which houses everything from electrical substations to natural-gas terminals. Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.
Among natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being completely unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be there when it happens: to steer clear of the vulnerable area in the first place, or get yourself to high ground as fast as possible. For the seventy-one thousand people who live in Cascadia’s inundation zone, that will mean evacuating in the narrow window after one disaster ends and before another begins. They will be notified to do so only by the earthquake itself—“a vibrate-alert system,” Kevin Cupples, the city planner for the town of Seaside, Oregon, jokes—and they are urged to leave on foot, since the earthquake will render roads impassable. Depending on location, they will have between ten and thirty minutes to get out. That time line does not allow for finding a flashlight, tending to an earthquake injury, hesitating amid the ruins of a home, searching for loved ones, or being a Good Samaritan. “When that tsunami is coming, you run,” Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission (OSSPAC), says. “You protect yourself, you don’t turn around, you don’t go back to save anybody. You run for your life.”
These lax safety policies guarantee that many people inside the inundation zone will not get out. Twenty-two per cent of Oregon’s coastal population is sixty-five or older. Twenty-nine per cent of the state’s population is disabled, and that figure rises in many coastal counties. “We can’t save them,” Kevin Cupples says. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll go around and check on the elderly.’ No. We won’t.”
Those who cannot get out of the inundation zone under their own power will quickly be overtaken by a greater one. A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water—not once it reaches the shore. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.
Wineglasses, antique vases, Humpty Dumpty, hip bones, hearts: what breaks quickly generally mends slowly, if at all. OSSPAC estimates that in the I-5 corridor it will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major highways, and eighteen months to restore health-care facilities. On the coast, those numbers go up. Whoever chooses or has no choice but to stay there will spend three to six months without electricity, one to three years without drinking water and sewage systems, and three or more years without hospitals. Those estimates do not apply to the tsunami-inundation zone, which will remain all but uninhabitable for years.
On the face of it, earthquakes seem to present us with problems of space: the way we live along fault lines, in brick buildings, in homes made valuable by their proximity to the sea. But, covertly, they also present us with problems of time. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average individual allotment of three score years and ten. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.
This problem is bidirectional. The Cascadia subduction zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do. Nor is it a problem of imagination. If you are so inclined, you can watch an earthquake destroy much of the West Coast this summer in Brad Peyton’s “San Andreas,” while, in neighboring theatres, the world threatens to succumb to Armageddon by other means: viruses, robots, resource scarcity, zombies, aliens, plague. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them.
That problem is not specific to earthquakes, of course. The Cascadia situation, a calamity in its own right, is also a parable for this age of ecological reckoning, and the questions it raises are ones that we all now face. How should a society respond to a looming crisis of uncertain timing but of catastrophic proportions? How can it begin to right itself when its entire infrastructure and culture developed in a way that leaves it profoundly vulnerable to natural disaster?
At an elementary school in the community of Gearhart, the children will be trapped. “They can’t make it out from that school,” Dougherty said. “They have no place to go.” On one side lies the ocean; on the other, a wide, roadless bog. When the tsunami comes, the only place to go in Gearhart is a small ridge just behind the school. At its tallest, it is forty-five feet high—lower than the expected wave in a full-margin earthquake. For now, the route to the ridge is marked by signs that say “Temporary Tsunami Assembly Area.” I asked Dougherty about the state’s long-range plan. “There is no long-range plan,” he said.
Dougherty’s office is deep inside the inundation zone, a few blocks from the beach. All day long, just out of sight, the ocean rises up and collapses, spilling foamy overlapping ovals onto the shore. Eighty miles farther out, ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea, the hand of a geological clock is somewhere in its slow sweep. All across the region, seismologists are looking at their watches, wondering how long we have, and what we will do, before geological time catches up to our own.
I took my little beagle down to the dog park yesterday so he could run and run and run. I swear he'll outrun any dog on the planet and just keep going.
People would come, run their dogs for a while, and leave. The little guy didn't want to go so we stayed for a total of well over two hours.
At one point a van pulled up and the owner got out with his dog. He came in and sat down at the little picnic table and we started chatting as strangers do. The conversation started getting into some interesting stuff and this fellow was obviously knowledgeable.
Eventually it emerged that he's a federal research scientist. What he told me gives me cause not to describe him in any detail that might give his identity away.
One thing we discussed is what it's like being a scientist in today's public service. I mentioned the CBC's ill-fated attempt to interview the top guy on drought research only to find, when they showed up, that he wasn't permitted to discuss drought or even use the word.
My new friend quite dispassionately confirmed the worst of what we've been hearing - how the public service has been sequestered from the very public they're supposed to serve - how government scientists are no longer in the traditional advisory role but now are expected to find things that comport with the government's political narrative or keep their thoughts, and their science, to themselves - how it's almost impossible to collaborate with scientists from other countries because Harper and Co. insist on a veto on publication, a term others simply cannot accept. These are all things we've heard many times before.
What I wasn't prepared for was this fellow's jarring assessment that a change of government won't fix what Harper has broken. He said the damage is too deep, too much science has been buried, destroyed or lost. Worse yet, he added, was that too many of the best minds have moved on. They're gone, either of their own choice or the government's, and they won't be coming back. They're done. That core, so methodically built up over the decades, is wrecked. It'll take decades more to build it all over again. It can't be fixed. We'll have to start pretty much from scratch.
FIFTY? Fifty self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms are now active? University of Arizona professor emeritus, natural resources, ecology and evolutionary biology, Guy McPherson no longer pursues pure science, environmental research. He can't. He's too busy digesting the mountains of research pouring in from other scientists and connecting the dots.
There's really no nice way to put this. McPherson has now logged 50 self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms underway. That's another way of saying "runaway global warming." At the time of the interview below, back in March, he'd only identified 39. Apparently eleven more have turned up since then.
In Dr. McPherson's assessment, we're screwed, it's done, over. He believes it will claim the lives of most of us alive today. Here it is, the Worst Case Scenario:
For several years I've been following the major feedback mechanisms at work today - the melting seabed methane clathrates, the tundra fires, the thawing permafrost, the vanishing Arctic sea ice, the retreat of glaciers and the astonishingly rapid acceleration in the melting of the Greenland ice cap.
We may have flipped the switch on these feedback loops but they're progressing on their own now and we have no idea how to make them stop much less turn the clock back. If the YouTube video wasn't convincing, you might read this July 7th article from Esquire.
Ah, forget all that 'doom and gloom' Look on the bright side. Aussie PM Tony Abbott is doubling down on his country's coal exports. Tony knows it's "the very foundation of prosperity." So there, Cobber, turn that frown upside down.
Relax. You're just going through a bout of separation anxiety for deserting your post and abandoning the Left. You want to be Latter Day Liberals, you've gotta suck it up and learn to get over these pangs of conscience. It's all part of the process of becoming the very thing that, for so many decades, you reviled.
Now, about those rightwing Greens. Well this sounds really neoliberal. Elizabeth May would like to make an announcement of a new Green Party policy she calls the the Guaranteed Liveable Income, or GLI. Our plan will ensure no Canadian’s income falls below what is necessary for health, life, and dignity.
Providing our most at-risk citizens with the resources they need to make ends meet greatly reduces the burden on our emergency and social services, saving our system money, and empowering all citizens to overcome periods of hardship.
Together, we can end poverty in Canada.
The GLI provides reassurance for families struggling to make ends meet,
a vital helping hand for stay-at-home parents, stability for the thousands of
Canadians who can only find part-time work, and much needed support for those
looking to complete their education and launch a successful career.
Cue La Marseillese and let's storm the Bastille of neoliberalism. Or, if that's too progressive for you just vote for Tommy Angry Beard. Hmm. I wonder what Tony Blair would look like with facial hair?
Just as Europe undermined the EU so too did we undermine, potentially fatally, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Both organizations foolishly indulged in a promiscuous bout of expansion that has left them unwieldy, incoherent and perhaps even dangerous.
This is EU Europe:
This is NATO:
Both began and operated quite well with a small, well integrated membership, capable of reliably cooperating to achieve clearly understood objectives. And then they both got just a little whorish in the bacchanal that marked the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Oh my, look, there's one missing - the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.
How they got left out I'll never know. I guess Bush and Cheney forgot about them in their race to march NATO to Russia's doorstep.
When it comes to NATO it might be a good idea to cull the membership herd, especially if we see the E.U. beginning to come part at the seams. There are a lot of scary people and movements waiting in the wings to exploit that chaos and we might not find their table manners exactly pleasing.
Don't forget that Article 5 business, the "mutual aid" clause that says an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all. There's no Article 5(b) that covers the situation where one NATO member attacks another. Worse yet, there are some NATO aspirants that might like nothing better than to provoke a regional adversary (can you say Russia?) and then drag in the NATO muscle. Think Georgia. Think Ukraine.
NATO was built to face threats from without, namely the Soviet bloc. It cobbled together nations of the Western European tradition on an implied assumption of shared values and principles. What a happy bunch of chaps - well, except for those uppity French. DeGaulle, you know.
NATO picked up some dodgy characters in its rampage of expansion to the East. Take Hungary, which joined in 1999. Sixty years earlier it joined another alliance, the Axis powers. And today you wouldn't consider Hungary a particularly enthusiastic adherent to democracy. Sort of like the little kid who's standing still in the corner of the pool. You just know he's peeing.
It's like having more kids than you can possibly feed. When you get the urge to add a few more, don't. And try to get the kids you do have educated and out the door as soon as you can.
Quick, put a call through to Grand Fenwick. I need to speak to the Duke.
We may be on the verge of witnessing a ground shaking, dangerous and scary spectacle - the dismemberment of the European Union. The recent events in Greece may have set some wheels in motion but Harvard professor of international relations, Stephen Walt, says the collapse of European unification traces much further back to five triggering events. He writes that no Western nation will emerge unscathed if it all falls apart.
As an economic unit, the EU has a combined GNP larger than that of the United States, considerable wealth, advanced industries, and significant military potential. The United States is formally allied with most of its members and has long benefited from cooperation with its fellow democracies there. Europe’s future course is therefore of considerable interest to the United States.
...Unfortunately, it is hard to be optimistic about the EU’s prospects today, especially its stated goal of an “ever closer union.” Despite its past achievements, the EU now suffers from growing tensions and several self-inflicted wounds. The EU is likely to experience repeated crises and internal divisions, and one cannot rule out a gradual and irreversible decline in its cohesion and influence. Because a prosperous and tranquil Europe is in America’s interest, this is not good news for the United States.
Today, the EU faces five fundamental challenges. None of them will be easy to overcome.
Problem No. 1: Overexpansion
The EU today is a victim of its past success. What began as a limited arrangement among six countries to coordinate coal and steel production has become an elaborate supranational organization of 28 members governed by a bewildering array of institutions and subsidiary agencies and hamstrung by the need to reach consensus before taking important decisions. At the same time, its members are still independent nation-states with their own governments and their own complicated internal political arrangements. America’s complex federal system is a model of simplicity by comparison.
Moreover, as the EU has expanded, its membership has become increasingly heterogeneous. Germany’s GDP is more than 300 times larger than Malta’s, and Luxembourg’s per capita income is nearly seven times higher than Latvia’s and five times higher than Greece’s. The geographic size, population, and economic resources of the member states are vastly different, and their respective cultures and national histories have become less similar as the EU has grown. Not surprisingly, expansion has made the EU more cumbersome, more divided, and less popular. In 2014, more than 70 percent of EU citizens surveyed believed their voices do not count in EU decision-making, and nearly two-thirds declared that the EU does not understand the needs of its citizens.
Gee, it sounds like the European Union fell victim to the same expansionist insanity that befell NATO. Go figure.
Problem No. 2: The collapse of the Soviet empire
Although the disappearance of the Soviet Union was a welcome development, it removed one of the main motivations for European unity. The EU is often seen as a purely economic and political project, but security concerns were a key part of its rationale from the start. That rationale faded as NATO grew stronger, and it disappeared when the Warsaw Pact collapsed. The absence of an external danger encouraged European leaders to focus more on selfish national concerns and to see the EU as a way to limit and constrain German dominance. (That last goal, needless to say, has not worked out quite as well as they hoped.) Since the early 1990s, EU members have repeatedly pledged to develop a “common foreign and security policy,” but they have never succeeded in doing so. Today, the incoherent European response to events in Ukraine highlights the lack of consensus on basic security issues.
Problem No. 3: The euro crisis
The third problem facing the EU today, of course, is the euro crisis.
It is now clear that the decision to create the euro was an enormous blunder, as skeptics warned at the time. It was done for political rather than economic reasons: to renew momentum for unity, to bind a reunified Germany more tightly inside European institutions, and to put Europe on a more equal footing with the United States.
But as the euro’s critics emphasized early on, the EU lacked the political and institutional mechanisms needed to make a currency union work. Instead, the euro’s proponents simply assumed the common-currency members would never let themselves get into serious financial trouble, and if this happened anyway (as, of course, it did), they further assumed that it would be easy to create the institutions that the eurozone lacked.
...Even worse, the crisis has sown deeper divisions within the continent, with debtors and creditors exhibiting a level of resentment and hostility not seen for many years. Instead of demonstrating a powerful commitment to European unity, EU member states now try to get what they want by threatening to blow up the entire enterprise. Greece used the threat of Grexit to try to win concessions from its creditors, and France used much the same threat to force Germany to soften its demands (however slightly).
Next up: British Prime Minster David Cameron will use the threat of a referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership in the EU to extract some special deals from the other members. When different states keep threatening to exit in order to blackmail their supposed partners, it hardly conveys the “one for all, all for one” spirit that is supposed to inspire and justify the broader European project. Needless to say, this situation is not what the euro’s creators had in mind when they took that fateful step.
Problem No. 4: A deteriorating regional environment
The EU now faces serious turmoil on its periphery, with direct consequences for Europe itself. State failures in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and sub-Saharan Africa have produced a flood of refugees seeking to get in, while the emergence of al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other extremist movements has had worrisome repercussions among some of Europe’s Muslim populations. The danger of homegrown or lone-wolf terrorism is often exaggerated, but it is not zero. And some Europeans now want to roll back the open internal borders that were a key achievement of the 1986 Single European Act. Meanwhile, the conflict in Ukraine raises new concerns about the security of the EU’s eastern frontier. The EU has been unable to agree on new measures to address any of these challenges, however, further underscoring its dysfunctional decision-making process.
Problem No. 5: The persistence of nationalism
The EU’s final challenge is the stubborn hold that nationalism exerts on the populations of the individual member states. The elites who launched the original European project hoped it would transcend existing national loyalties, but nationalism remains alive and well throughout the continent. Britain may vote to leave the EU next year (though I believe this is unlikely), Scottish nationalism may lead it to exit the United Kingdom, and nationalist sentiments continue to simmer in Catalonia and elsewhere.
Economic stagnation, high youth unemployment, and concerns about immigration have also fueled a resurgence of Euroskeptic nationalist parties that reject the core principles on which the EU is built. Add to this mix Europe’s unfavorable demography — its overall population is declining and the median age is rising rapidly — and you have a recipe for slow economic growth and growing dissatisfaction with mainstream parties and existing political institutions. If these trends eventually allow groups like the National Front in France to gain real power, support for an “ever closer union” will erode even further.
Professor Walt foresees just three possible outcomes to Europe's woes. It could find a path to resolve these five threats but he doesn't think they've got the leadership to do it.
There are no European leaders today with the vision and stature of an Adenauer, de Gaulle, or Thatcher, and it would take years for serious reforms to work their way through the EU’s elaborate consensus-based governing machinery.
Instead of an “ever closer union,” therefore, the EU is more likely to simply muddle through. It will keep applying Band-Aids to contain the euro crisis and will hope that trade deals with the United States and China will provide an economic boost. In this scenario — which I regard as the most likely — the EU will stay in business, but robust growth will remain elusive, support for the union will decline, and Europe’s global influence will continue to wane.
But there is a third possibility: The EU experiment could start to unravel. A Greek exit from the eurozone would set a dangerous precedent, nationalist resentments could deepen, leaders with more authoritarian inclinations could come to power (as has already occurred in Hungary), and Greece could dissolve into widespread social unrest (or worse). Some European states might even look to Moscow for help (though they are unlikely to get much). If disintegration begins, the only question will be: How far and how fast will it go?
...To sum up: Since the end of World War II, stability and prosperity in Europe have been of enormous benefit to the United States. The European Union has been a key ingredient in a world order that has been highly favorable for America. If the EU’s best days are behind it, Americans will have to prepare for a world that is less stable, secure, and prosperous than the one to which they have become accustomed. We should hope this is not the case, but it is the most likely outcome given where Europe is today.
Is it the Euro or is it Angela Merkel - or both? Whatever the case, Merkel's brutal subjugation of Greece has given the neighbours outside the Eurozone good cause to think twice about joining the common currency, the Euro.
Once, it was an exclusive club that nearly all of Europe aspired to join. Now, in the wake of Greece's latest financial crisis and the hard-line response from many of the Continent's powers, becoming a partner in the European common currency seems less and less appealing to many of the countries lined up for their chance.
From Poland to the Czech Republic to Hungary and points farther south and east, joining the euro is increasingly seen as rife with risks and costs - including a substantial surrender of sovereignty - that outweigh the benefits. And while many of the countries that have not yet adopted the single currency had doubts before the Greek crisis flared, the heavy penalties incurred by Athens to stay in the eurozone have made the trade-offs even clearer and the political leanings against membership more pronounced.
The qualms about partnership in the currency raise further questions about the ability of the European Union to maintain momentum toward its long-held and oft-stated goal of ever-closer union. More than any other policy, the single currency was intended to bind the members economically and politically while reducing the chances of conflict, and the decline in enthusiasm for the union has tracked a more general reassessment of European integration.
The doubts are now playing out primarily in the countries that most recently joined the European Union, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe. Lithuania became the 19th and newest adopter of the euro in January.
...Zoltan Pogatsa, a political economist at the University of West Hungary, said the greatest benefits to joining the eurozone came from undertaking the financial reforms required to become a member. Once that stability is achieved, he said, it may be wiser to keep the local currency and peg it to the euro, as Denmark and Sweden have done.
"This way, you preserve your option to devalue, and you do not fall under the technocratic dictatorship of austerity," he said.
It's an old adage going back to the legend of the Trojan Horse described by Virgil in the Aeneid. In Latin it's Timeo Danaos et dona ferenteswhich translates into 'beware of Greeks, even those bearing gifts.'
I'm not sure if Angela Merkel has read much Virgil but maybe she should as she considers the Greek parliament's gift of capitulation they delivered up to her this week.
It was remarkable. The Greeks accepted endless, brutal austerity and a state of perma-recession without end made all the more remarkable by the clear voice of the Greek people in the referendum less than a week earlier and the IMF's Pontius Pilate act of washing its hands of Merkel's insane demands just a day before.
Substitute souvlaki for schnitzel and you've got the makings of a 21st century Weimar Republic with all the hardship, social unrest, and instability that brought that most famous German leader of the 20th century to power. And it's the sort of contagion that might not be contained within Greece either. When the Germans come marching it unsettles a lot of Europeans.
Merkel's ham-fisted demands, like most irrationalities, were fear-driven. Germany was afraid that if Greece's creditors were forced to take a "hair cut", grant debt relief to Athens, it would send a message to the rest of Europe's debtor nations - foremost among them Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy. Something of such a seismic magnitude could wreck European unity. Better that the Greeks be destroyed. Anything else would send the others the wrong message.
The problem that Merkel has made for herself is how to keep Greece from becoming her Trojan Horse. How will she stabilize it if its people are consigned into permanent indentured servitude? How will she keep the Greek people from being radicalized? Does she think European unity can withstand a repressive military takeover of the civil government in Athens? She has already set Greece into a death spiral. How does she think that's going to end? Even Germany's brightest minds are saying she's set Germany's reputation back a half century.
Jürgen Habermas, one of the intellectual figureheads of European integration, has launched a withering attack on the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, accusing her of “gambling away” the efforts of previous generations to rebuild the country’s postwar reputation with her hardline stance on Greece.
Speaking about the bailout deal for the first time since it was presented on Monday, the philosopher and sociologist said the German chancellor had effectively carried out “an act of punishment” against the leftwing government of Alexis Tsipras.
“I fear that the German government, including its social democratic faction, have gambled away in one night all the political capital that a better Germany had accumulated in half a century,” he told the Guardian. Previous German governments, he said, had displayed “greater political sensitivity and a post-national mentality”.
Habermas, widely considered one of the most influential contemporary European intellectuals, said that by threatening Greecewith an exit from the eurozone over the course of the negotiations, Germany had “unashamedly revealed itself as Europe’s chief disciplinarian and for the first time openly made a claim for German hegemony in Europe.”
The outcome of the negotiations between Greece and the other eurozone member states, he said, did “not make sense in economic terms because of the toxic mixture of necessary structural reforms of state and economy with further neoliberal impositions that will completely discourage an exhausted Greek population and kill any impetus to growth.”
Habermas added: “Forcing the Greek government to agree to an economically questionable, predominantly symbolic privatisation fund cannot be understood as anything other an act of punishment against a leftwing government.”
Which again makes me wonder what Tsipras was thinking when he persuaded the Greek legislators to throw in the towel. Was this his Trojan Horse? Has he calculated that Germany will find itself with far more to lose than Greece? Is this just a means of bringing the illogic of these insane demands to a head? Is the Greek government essentially staging a pan-European "sit in" and defying Merkel to take the next, and perhaps final, step?
No matter how you look at the situation, one thing is clear. This game is not over. It's only just begun.
But before bidding adieu to Jurgen Habermas, consider his further remarks not just in the context of a Europe in turmoil but in relation to Canada.
Recently, the 86-year-old has aggressively criticised Merkel’s leadership in Europe in books such as The Lure of Technocracy, while also coming under criticism himself. In 2013, Habermas clashed in a series of articles with another influential German leftwing intellectual, sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, who has identified the kind of European federalism espoused by Habermas as the root of the continent’s crisis.
Habermas told the Guardian that he agreed with many of his critics’ main points. “Streeck and I also share the view that this technocratic hollowing out of democracy is the result of a neoliberal pattern of market-deregulation policies,” he said. “The balance between politics and the market has got out of sync, at the cost of the welfare state.
“Where we differ is in terms of the consequences to be drawn from this predicament. I do not see how a return to nation states that have to be run like big corporations in a global market can counter the tendency towards de-democratisation and growing social inequality – something that we also see in Great Britain, by the way."
As I've followed the ups and downs of Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and even the now relatively dormant Forconi movement in Italy it was obvious that these were reactions to the devastating social impacts of neoliberalism, market fundamentalism and the substitution of corporatism for democracy - something that is also setting in here at home in Canada. The Left has been abandoned, vacated, and with it Canada's political spectrum has narrowed and stands enfeebled, capable of squeezing into the democracy-suffocating confines of the age of neoliberalism. The New Dem faithful will angrily deny it but that's because they're not looking hard enough.
Given that all of Canada's mainstream parties embrace the petro-state, it's pretty obvious that change is going to have to be driven from without, not within. All this bullshit - get involved with the party, change it from inside - is really just bullshit. C'mon in, vent a little, then sit down and shut up.
The opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline and the Kitimat supertanker port didn't come from within the "anything but" Liberal party of Christy Clark. It came from ordinary residents of British Columbia who were fed up and had simply had enough. Suddenly we had Crusty and Justin and the rest of the Pack of Fools muttering about "social licence."
I was reminded of this when I read an opinion piece in today's Guardian by the paper's new 'social media' writer, Ellie Mae O'Hagen (yeah, I know. "Ellie Mae"? Really?) about how she came to join the social activist group, UK Uncut, and the remarkable things it accomplished just by trying.
...I was idly scrolling through Twitter (some things don’t change) and I noticed something stirring. A group of activists hadoccupied Vodafone’s flagship store in protest against the company’s alleged tax avoidance. .They shut Vodafone down. It was amazing: new, young, immediate, exciting – and totally different from the A-to-B marches I’d taken part in beforethe UK invaded Iraq in 2003.
I emailed the activists: “That was amazing! Is there anything going in Liverpool?” A man, now one of my best friends, emailed me back. And that was the moment that changed me.
To this day, I don’t know what spurred me on to take up the challenge and organise a protest in Liverpool, but a few days later I had gathered a ragtag bunch of activists I’d never met before. And the mere suggestion that we might take direct action caused Vodafone to shut down both its Liverpool stores in advance.
Those London-based activists, of which I was now one, were the beginning of the direct action network UK Uncut. Since its inception it has inspired more than 800 protests across the country; it’s been derided by establishment institutions from parliament to Fox News; it was one of the reasons Starbucks felt compelled to pay £20m in tax to the Treasury; it propelled tax avoidance up the political agenda; and it introduced me to some of my now closest friends, changing my life irreversibly.
The events flowing from that email led me to a realisation that I have never forgotten: change is possible. Since my time with UK Uncut, I have spent a lot of time talking to people about activism, and the most common sentiment I hear is that it’s pointless: “They won’t listen anyway.” It’s the same inertia I fell into after the Iraq war, but it couldn’t be more wrong.
People in power aren’t ambivalent about protest; they’re terrified of it. Social progress plods along like a tortoise, and protest is the jet pack you attach to its back. It’s not true to say protest doesn’t work: in fact, it’s the only thing that does work. That’s why we’re constantly encouraged not to do it.
I’ve seen how people’s lives can be changed through taking action, sometimes at enormous cost (as with many activists I’ve met in Colombia) – sometimes with enormous rewards, and often both at the same time. I’ve seen how activism can be a transformative process for activists themselves, as well as for the society they wish to change.
I took in my little town's Tuesday evening summer market this week. Local artisans set up booths and sell their wares mainly to the tourists who come to our resorts. Some were a lot more successful than others and I noticed one with a line up of customers. As I got closer it was a "Save Our Coast" kiosk dedicated to opposing the Kinder Morgan and Northern Gateway dilbit initiatives. People were lining up to buy T-shirts and hats and stickers emblazened with the "Save Our Coast" slogan. The merch seemed to be flying off their tables. The message was so simple but it was also so connective "our coast." Yes, it's ours. It belongs to all of us. It's ours to save, to defend. That's a powerful thought to convey and the visitors who bought that stuff will be spreading that message even further when they get home. And, eventually, the message filters up until the people who most need to hear it can't avoid it any longer.
The animal rights group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has a long-running battle with SeaWorld, the place that takes beautiful orca and confines them in the orca equivalent of a bath tub, a microbial swamp where the delightful critters can swim, if you can call it swimming, in their own waste all day long (and most nights too).
Now PETA is accusing the SeaWorld operation in California of infiltrating their group not just with a spy but an agent provacateur.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Norfolk, Virginia-based animal rights group said SeaWorld had become "so upset" that it deployed one of its human relations employees to masquerade as an activist, sending him on undercover missions at protests and organizational meetings in California.
"But, most insidiously, he has repeatedly tried to incite people who object to SeaWorld to act illegally, stating that it's time to 'get a little aggressive,'" PETA said.
In a written statement in response to PETA's allegations, SeaWorld said it was "focused on the safety of our team members, guests and animals, and beyond that we do not comment on our security operations."
Classy, SeaWorld, very classy. Out here on the island one sure sign of summer is the commencement of cheesy TV ads for some place in Ontario called MarineLand. "Everyone loves MarineLand" is the slogan only when I see all those belugas floating captive in a set made to resemble the ice floes of their native Arctic waters I wonder who in his right mind would ever take his kids there. When I hear that jingle it's like nails dragged across a blackboard. It's not "everybody" without me and I don't love MarineLand. I despise MarineLand and I have nothing but contempt for those who own it and run it.
If you really need to see these creatures that badly, come on out here. We've got loads of dolphins and whales and, yes, orca. One of my neighbours was out swimming at a beach less than a mile from my place before the heat wave broke. The water was delightfully warm-ish and she was able to go a fair bit out away from the beach. As she describes it she was relaxing, treading water, when she heard a "whoosh" behind her that made her spin around. It was a pod of orca just swimming by. I've only known two others who've had such a close encounter with these animals but they all seem to have the same reaction. Their attention is riveted to the intelligence in the eye they see checking them out. They describe a sort of fleeting connection with the orca and it seems to stay with them afterwards.
By Harperland I mean Alberta and Ottawa, two places where it is undesired that anyone should utter the word "drought." This CBC News report is humorous on one level and just a bit creepy on another. Naturally, this being Harperland after all, it features the obligatory gagged scientist.
I'm pretty sure they wrote this song for Donald Trump and all the lesser Donald Trumps of the world.
And, by the way, you might be wondering how Donald Trump can be the frontrunner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. I think Dennis Leary perfectly captures Trump's support base.
The video leaves no doubt. Diaz Zeferino was executed in cold blood by LA cops. Zeferino was out on his bicycle trying to help a friend locate his stolen bike when the cops descended. A brown man on a bicycle, it had to be stolen right? And so they apprehended Zeferino and then cut him down.
Congratulations to the LA Times for fighting against the city cops to get this video released. In case for some reason you're wondering, the cops who murdered Zeferino were never charged and returned to duty.
He was the burr under Angela Merkel's saddle until the Troika said he had to go. Now Yanis Varoufakis has given an interview to Britain's New Statesman, the first since he's been truly free to speak his mind.
Varoufakis, who resigned a week ago, has been criticised for not signing an agreement sooner, but he said the deal that Greece was offered was not made in good faith – or even one that the Troika wanted completed. In an hour-long telephone interview with the New Statesman, he called the creditors’ proposals – those agreed to by the Athens government on Friday night, which now seem somehow generous – “absolutely impossible, totally non-viable and toxic …[they were] the kind of proposals you present to another side when you don’t want an agreement.”
...In Varoufakis’s account, the Troika never genuinely negotiated during his five months as finance minister. He argued that Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza government was elected to renegotiate an austerity programme that had clearly failed; over the past five years it has put a quarter of Greeks out of work, and created the worst depression anywhere in the developed world since the 1930s. But he thinks that Greece’s creditors simply led him on.
...Varoufakis said that Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister and the architect of the deals Greece signed in 2010 and 2012, was “consistent throughout”. “His view was ‘I’m not discussing the programme – this was accepted by the previous [Greek] government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything.
“So at that point I said ‘Well perhaps we should simply not hold elections anymore for indebted countries’, and there was no answer. The only interpretation I can give [of their view] is, ‘Yes, that would be a good idea, but it would be difficult. So you either sign on the dotted line or you are out.’”
...“It’s not that it didn’t go down well – there was point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments. Point blank. You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on, to make sure it’s logically coherent, and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem – you’d have got the same reply.”
...Varoufakis was reluctant to name individuals, but added that the governments that might have been expected to be the most sympathetic towards Greece were actually their “most energetic enemies”. He said that the “greatest nightmare” of those with large debts – the governments of countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland – “was our success”. “Were we to succeed in negotiating a better deal, that would obliterate them politically: they would have to answer to their own people why they didn’t negotiate like we were doing.”
...The second phase was they’d ask us what we intended to do on VAT. They would then reject our proposal but wouldn’t come up with a proposal of their own. And then, before we would get a chance to agree on VAT, they would shift to another issue, like privatisation. They would ask what we want to do about privatisation: we put something forward, they would reject it. Then they’d move onto another topic, like pensions, from there to product markets, from there to labour relations. … It was like a cat chasing its own tail.”
His conclusion was succinct. “We were set up.”
And he was adamant about who is responsible. I asked whether German attitudes control the outlook of the Eurogroup. Varoufakis went further. “Oh completely and utterly. Not attitudes – the finance minister of Germany. It is all like a very well-tuned orchestra and he is the director.
Tsipras folds and betrays his own people's referendum.
“So,” Varoufakis said, “What we have is a non-existent group that has the greatest power to determine the lives of Europeans. It’s not answerable to anyone, given it doesn’t exist in law; no minutes are kept; and it’s confidential. No citizen ever knows what is said within . . . These are decisions of almost life and death, and no member has to answer to anybody.”
How Varoufakis was driven out of office.
He said he spent the past month warning the Greek cabinet that the ECB would close Greece’s banks to force a deal. When they did, he was prepared to do three things: issue euro-denominated IOUs; apply a “haircut” to the bonds Greek issued to the ECB in 2012, reducing Greece’s debt; and seize control of the Bank of Greece from the ECB.
None of the moves would constitute a Grexit but they would have threatened it. Varoufakis was confident that Greece could not be expelled by the Eurogroup; there is no legal provision for such a move. But only by making Grexit possible could Greece win a better deal. And Varoufakis thought the referendum offered Syriza the mandate they needed to strike with such bold moves – or at least to announce them.
He hinted at this plan on the eve of the referendum, and reports later suggested this was what cost him his job. He offered a clearer explanation.
As the crowds were celebrating on Sunday night in Syntagma Square, Syriza’s six-strong inner cabinet held a critical vote. By four votes to two, Varoufakis failed to win support for his plan, and couldn’t convince Tsipras. He had wanted to enact his “triptych” of measures earlier in the week, when the ECB first forced Greek banks to shut. Sunday night was his final attempt. When he lost his departure was inevitable.
“That very night the government decided that the will of the people, this resounding ‘No’, should not be what energised the energetic approach [his plan]. Instead it should lead to major concessions to the other side: the meeting of the council of political leaders, with our Prime Minister accepting the premise that whatever happens, whatever the other side does, we will never respond in any way that challenges them. And essentially that means folding. … You cease to negotiate.”
It's something that's been getting a lot of attention lately - the emotional, psychological overload being experienced by climate scientists and advocates having to deal, up close, day in and day out, with the reality of what is happening to our world.
An article in today's Sydney Morning Herald (via WaPo) explores how those most intimately involved in the field are struggling to cope in a world that really doesn't seem to care. They're coming down with a form of post traumatic stress disorder now sometimes labelled "climate trauma."
One victim is American professor, Camille Parmesan, who eventually had to find refuge across the Atlantic, in England.
As recently as 2009, Camille Parmesan had a career that most scientists can only dream of.
That year, the University of Texas professor was named one of Atlantic Monthly's 27 "Brave Thinkers" for her efforts to save species whose habitats are threatened by climate change.
...But beneath the acclaim, Parmesan recalls, her work left her "professionally depressed" and panicked — so much so that she eventually abandoned her life in the United States for a new one on the other side of the Atlantic, according to the environmental news website Grist.
"To be honest, I panicked 15 years ago — that was when the first studies came out showing that Arctic tundras were shifting from being a net sink to being a net source of CO2," she told Esquire's John Richardson for a recent piece about the emotional toll of climate science. "That along with the fact this butterfly I was studying shifted its entire range across half a continent — I said this is big, this is big. Everything since then has just confirmed it."
Today, Parmesan is a professor at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, where, she told Grist, she is no longer forced to spend the first half of her talks convincing audiences that climate change is real.
,,,As climate change accelerates, weather patterns around the world become more extreme and models become more dire, scientists find themselves fighting a war on two fronts. The first battleground is a professional one and carries with it the burden of charting humanity's potential demise, all while enduring targeted attacks that, according to Esquire, include "death threats, summonses from a hostile Congress, attempts to get them fired, legal harassment, and intrusive discovery demands so severe they had to start their own legal-defence fund."
The second front is a personal one and involves finding ways to maintain hopefulness when days are spent digging into apocalyptic scenarios that go largely unnoticed — or fiercely dismissed — by the general public.
"So many of us are exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of post-traumatic disorder — the anger, the panic, the obsessive intrusive thoughts," Dr Lise Van Susteren, a practicing psychiatrist and climate activist, told Esquire.
Among them is Gillian Caldwell, a human rights activist and former director of WITNESS, who has investigated human trafficking in Russia and rape as a tool of war in Sierra Leone. And yet, Caldwell writes, her efforts to get her country to tackle global warming remain the most emotionally demanding task she's ever performed.
Sometimes the struggle is as simple as going outside and looking up at the sky. In a tear-filled interview about "climate advocacy trauma," Caldwell says that one of the sacrifices climate activists make is never being able to experience weather the same way again.
...Adding to the mounting stress faced by climate change scientists is the inevitable backlash they can expect to encounter from unqualified critics of their research, according to Jeffrey Kiehl, a senior scientist for climate change research at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
"How would that make you feel?" Kiehl told Grist. "You take this information to someone and they say they don't believe you, as if it's a question of beliefs. I'm not talking about religion here, I'm talking about facts. It's equivalent to a doctor doing extremely detailed observations on someone and concluding that someone needed to have an operation, and the person looks at the doctor and says, 'I don't believe you.' How would a doctor feel in that moment, not think, but feel in that moment?"
"I don't know of a single scientist that's not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost," Parmesan is quoted as saying in the report, in reference to an ocean reef she has spent more than a decade studying. "It's gotten to be so depressing that I'm not sure I'm going to go back to this particular site again, because I just know I'm going to see more and more of it dead, and bleached, and covered with brown algae."
Dr Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, told Esquire that climate-change deniers have demoralised his colleagues, leaving one suicidal. Despite promising developments, such as increased public awareness and the recent agreement between the United States and China on emissions, Mann continues to battle nightmares and struggle under the weight of his own environmental awareness.
He has broken down in front of his students and can't shake the fears he has about his daughter living in an alien planet that no longer resembled the one she was born into.
"I don't want her to have to be sad," Mann told Esquire. "And I almost have to believe we're not yet there, where we are resigned to this future."
Yet look around and you'll see compelling signs that we are indeed "resigned to this future." Here in Canada none of the mainstream parties is prepared to break with our extractive, fossil fuel industries. Not one will even talk about shutting that down and moving Canada into a post-carbon future. Not Harper, not Trudeau, not Mulcair.
They're not stupid men. They've heard the warnings, the scientific consensus that, if our grandkids and future generations that will follow, are to have a reasonable chance at any viable life, we need to leave most fossil fuels and all of the really high-carbon fossil fuels in the ground, untouched. They know that transitioning into a decarbonized society and economy is the only hope these future generations have and yet we're writing their fate indelibly today sacrificing the future to the immediate demands of partisan political opportunism.
Why do they do it? That's easy. It's because you, me, all of us let them get away with it. If you're a Lib you'll vote for Justin. If you're a New Dem you won't let it stop you from voting for Mulcair. And with every ballot cast, we're proving that we are indeed "resigned to this future."
