Tank Man at Tiananmen Square: 25 years ago, on June 4, 1989, 300 to 2,000 killed by Chinese military for protesting for more democracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-nXT8lSnPQ

Do not forget that 25 years ago, the leaders of China ordered the military to fire on unarmed protesters in Tiananmen Square.  Reports vary on how many died, but the low figure is 300.  The high figure is 2,000.

James Hansen Newsweek interview by Sharon Begley: It’s Not the Kind of Thing Where You Can Compromise

‘It’s Not the Kind of Thing Where You Can Compromise’

Climate scientist James Hansen talks about global warming, Copenhagen, and his new book

by Sharon Begley, Newsweek Web Exclusive, November 24, 2009

On Nov. 25th, 2009, this article was updated with new responses from Dr. Hansen regarding leaked e-mails which discussed potential manipulation of some climate change data. 
 
James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, is one of the world's most famous climatologists. He testified at a 1988 U.S. Senate hearing that the emission of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels was already producing a greenhouse effect, and during the administration of George W. Bush, political appointees tried to keep him from speaking out about global warming. Hansen, 68, has become increasingly convinced that a climate crisis is upon us, warning this summer that the climate system is racing toward "tipping points" which, if passed, would lead to irreversible and catastrophic effects. On the eve of the publication of his first book, Storms of My Grandchildren, which he finished while recovering from treatment for prostate cancer and which will be published in December, he spoke to me by phone. Later in the week, I followed up to discuss the news of leaked e-mails from researchers who allegedly ignored evidence unfavorable to climate change. Excerpts:

Last week, someone leaked e-mails obtained by hacking into the server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Activists who have long denied the reality of climate change say they show that climatologists have engaged in a grand conspiracy to manufacture a case that global warming is occurring due to human activities. Do the hacked e-mails undermine the case for anthropogenic climate change?
Dr. Hansen: No, they have no effect on the science. The evidence for human-made climate change is overwhelming.

Do the e-mails indicate any unethical efforts to hide data that do not support the idea of anthropogenic global warming or to keep contrary ideas out of the scientific literature and IPCC reports?
Dr. Hansen: They indicate poor judgment in specific cases. First, the data behind any analysis should be made publicly available. Second, rather than trying so hard to prohibit publication of shoddy science, which is impossible, it is better that reviews, such as by IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences, summarize the full range of opinions and explain clearly the basis of the scientific assessment. The "contrarians" or "deniers" do not have a scientific leg to stand on. Their aim is to win a public relations battle, or at least get a draw, which may be enough to stymie the actions that are needed to stabilize climate.

How serious a setback would it be if no agreement on a climate treaty is reached in Copenhagen, where 192 countries are meeting starting Dec. 7?
Dr. Hansen: It's not a setback at all if it allows a careful reassessment of what is needed. The cap-and-trade scheme [that the Copenhagen negotiations were working toward] is just not going to be effective at controlling greenhouse emissions. Political leaders have to realize that the fundamental problem is that fossil fuels are the cheapest form of energy, so they will continue to be burned unless we put a gradually increasing price on carbon emissions [through a carbon tax]. That's a much better approach than national goals for emissions reductions, which will probably not be met.

Policymakers who deny the threat of climate change cite the research of Richard Lindzen of MIT and other scientists, who question the link between carbon dioxide and global warming—as the last head of NASA, Michael Griffin, also did. As long as there remains this scientific dispute, why should policy makers act?
Dr. Hansen: These contrarians are not having much effect. None of the major countries are denying the problem anymore, though in the U.S. these contrarians are still widely heard, and when it comes to passing a bill in Congress they may still be an obstacle.

In the 1980s scientists worried about a doubling of pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide, to 550 parts per million. Then 450 started to look like a problem. Now you and others say that 350 is dangerous, and we’re already at 387. What did climatologists learn that caused them to lower the estimate of dangerous CO₂ levels?
Dr. Hansen: The new information came from observations of how the system is responding to 387 ppm and to more detailed information on how earth responded in the past to different atmospheric compositions. For instance, we see that the ice sheets are not stable at 387 ppm; the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass even with current warming. The Greenland ice sheet had been losing between 150 and 200 km³ a year in 2002, and now is losing almost 300 km³ a year. Antarctica had been losing less than 100 km³ a year, and is now losing more than 150, so it seems like we're heading into a period of much more rapid ice sheet loss. Also, in the Arctic we've lost 40% of the sea ice in the warm season, and that will soon be 100% percent. Mountain glaciers are retreating rapidly and could be gone in 50 years. These are not model results but observations: 387 ppm is already too high, and 450 ppm will be far worse.

In Storms of My Grandchildren, you describe climate tipping points. What are some and why are they so dangerous?
Dr. Hansen: Things like methane hydrates on the continental shelf and the tundra: as they warm up they release their methane [which is a greenhouse gas], which we're already seeing in the tundra and elsewhere. Tipping points are so dangerous because if you pass them, the climate is out of humanity's control: if an ice sheet disintegrates and starts to slide into the ocean there's nothing we can do about that.

What caused you to move beyond research and become an outspoken advocate for addressing climate change?
Dr. Hansen: The realization that there was a gap between what had become clear scientifically and what policymakers knew. Then, when I wrote papers and gave talks on climate change, it became clear that the political system just didn't want to react to this. Scientists have to help politicians connect the dots.

George F. Will has argued that reducing U.S. carbon emissions 80% by 2050 would leave us with per capita emissions we last had in the 1800s, implying we'd be back to a horse-and-buggy, pre-electricity era. Is he right?
Dr. Hansen:  Not at all. We don't have to decrease our energy use, we just have to decrease our carbon emissions. That's why you want to increase the price of carbon, so let other technologies take over, like energy efficiency and renewables. We'll be moving into a better world, not a worse one, not to a horse-and-buggy world but to one with cleaner air and water once we stop burning coal.

You are critical of the Kyoto climate treaty. Why?
Dr. Hansen:  Because it allows carbon offsets and uses cap-and-trade. Emissions from oil, gas, and coal have actually increased under Kyoto. If we just set goals for emissions reductions and allow people to miss them and to use offsets, we're not going to stabilize and reduce greenhouse emissions at the rate needed.

Do we still have time to avert climate calamity, and if so what would it take?
Dr. Hansen:  We do, but just barely. If we phase out coal linearly by 2030, CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere will peak at 400-425 ppm, which is low enough that it allows you to get back to 350, especially if there is extensive reforestation of degraded areas. So a fundamental requirement is to phase out the use of coal in 20 years, which means you have to start now and not build any more coal-burning power plants: these have a lifetime of decades, and once they're built, utilities don't want to retire them before their lifetime is up.

You write that energy efficiency and renewables won't be enough to meet the energy needs of China and India in the next few decades. So what do we do?
Dr. Hansen:  They will require nuclear power for electricity. They are both moving in that direction, and we really should help them. They have such polluted air and water that they'd love to get off dirty fuels like coal. Of course, you also want to do energy efficiency and renewables, but I think India and China will turn more toward nuclear. I think the prospects for that are quite good, but we have to get going now.

What do you think of the climate bills now before Congress?
Dr. Hansen:  They're disasters. We can't allow the polluters to write the bill, but that's what happened. What's needed is putting a price on carbon, not cap-and-trade.

What do you think of Obama's performance on this issue so far?
Dr. Hansen:  A lot of individual things have been good, like using EPA to apply pressure for improved vehicle mileage, but I'm disappointed that he hasn't taken a leadership role. He's let the politicians in Washington come up with these bills rather than offering them some guidance. Climate change is analogous to Lincoln and slavery or Churchill and Nazism: it's not the kind of thing where you can compromise. He needs to have some understanding of this [climate] problem himself, and not just listen to his advisers.

Are policies like Cash for Clunkers, or "cash for caulkers" [home weatherizing], or green jobs initiatives useful or just more greenwashing?
Dr. Hansen:  They're useful but costly. What you want to do is address [climate change] in the most cost-effective way possible, which is to put a price on carbon. For example, there's a program to let people fold the cost of improving the energy of their home or of adding clean energy [by installing solar panels or other forms of renewable energy] into their monthly mortgage payment. You decrease your monthly energy costs by more than the amount that gets added to your mortgage, since you're averaging the cost over several years. This works best if you have a rising price on carbon.

You write about the need to take to the streets and engage in civil resistance. Such as?
Dr. Hansen:  Anything that draws attention to the fundamental problem. We just had this example of the student in Utah who upset the Bureau of Land Management by bidding on oil and gas leases, without even intending to pay for them, in order to stop energy companies from acquiring them and drilling on public lands.

You make it sound like now that you've written the book, you're going to go hole up in your lab. Really?
Dr. Hansen:  I wish I could. But when I started to speak out about climate change in 2004, after 15 years of avoiding it, I saw that the problem is not going to be solved easily. I'm afraid this is going to continue.

Sharon Begley is NEWSWEEK's science editor and author of  The Plastic Mind: New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform OurselvesandTrain Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves. 

Link:  http://www.newsweek.com/id/224178/page/1 

Chris Hedges: Refuse allegiance to coal, practice non-violent protests to shut down coal-fired power plants

Chris Hedges' Columns

Refuse Allegiance to Coal

by Chris Hedges, Truthdig, November 23, 2009

There are some 614 coal-fired power plants in the United States, and it is up to us to shut them down. No one in the White House will do it. No one in Congress will do it. And no one at the coming U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen will do it. We will build local movements to carry out acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to halt the burning of coal, or the polar ice caps will continue to dissolve, the Greenland ice sheet will disappear, the glaciers in the Alps, the Himalayas and Tibet will melt, and widespread droughts, rising sea levels and temperatures, acute food shortages, disease and gigantic mass migrations will envelop the globe. We are killing the ecosystem on which human life depends. One of the major polluters is coal, which supplies about half of the country’s electricity. NASA’s James Hansen has demonstrated that our only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe level—below 350 parts per million CO₂—lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity. We are currently at 390 parts per million carbon dioxide.

“The world political system is not about to keel over and give us a treaty that will get us to 350 parts per million anytime soon, or in fact do anything of great note,” the writer and environmental activist Bill McKibben told me when I met him in New York City. The author of “The End of Nature” and “Deep Economy” said: “The news that the Obama administration had punted on the Copenhagen talks is discouraging. The good news, to the extent that there is any, is that we finally have the beginning of a real global movement about climate change.”

McKibben and his group, 350.org, this year organized perhaps the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history: On Oct. 24, 2009, people in 181 countries joined in calling for environmental reform. But such popular calls for change have largely been ignored by the leaders of industrialized nations. The climate crisis will be solved by widespread and sustained civil disobedience or not at all.

“There were no celebrities, no rock stars, no movie stars,” McKibben said of the October protest. “People were rallying around a fairly obscure scientific data point, and the 25,000 pictures or so that have come into the flickr site from the 5,200 events in 181 countries make it clear that the canard that environmentalism is something for rich white people is crazy. It is mostly something for black, brown and yellow people and mostly something for poor people. We are all going to bear the consequences before very long, but Bangladesh and places like Bangladesh get it first. This is why it was so great to see them heavily involved. We have about half the countries in the world that have endorsed the 350 [parts per million] target. Unfortunately they are the poorest countries on Earth. They will not carry the day at Copenhagen or anywhere else, but they have begun to challenge the right of the rich countries of the world to submerge them, burn them up or whatever else.”

There are five countries that are responsible for over half of fossil-fuel-related CO₂ emissions. The United States and China alone account for more than a third. We in the U.S. have been the world’s largest emitters for more than a century, although we have now been overtaken by China, where growth in emissions has been driven by a rapid increase in coal consumption. China is currently opening an average of two coal-fired power plants a week. Emissions there have more than doubled since 1990. The burden to act rests on us, our major trading partner and a handful of other highly industrialized nations.

“The average American family uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve and dinner on Jan. 2 than the average Tanzanian family uses all year,” McKibben said.

The projected rise of sea levels, as much as six feet this century and 23 feet if the Greenland ice sheet disappears, will submerge coastal nations such as Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people, as well as places such as the Mekong Delta, the Maldives and the Marshall Islands. The disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau—glaciers that feed the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze and Yellow rivers—will create catastrophic water shortages and devastate the rice and wheat harvests in China and India, where about 4 of every 10 people live. World food prices will rise dramatically. If we can’t save countries such as the Maldives and Bangladesh, we will also be unable to save Venice, Hawaii, the Netherlands, New Zealand, London, Hong Kong and Manhattan. But don’t expect much from Barack Obama and other leaders in the industrialized world. Their loyalty is not to the planet, or to us, but to the oil and gas industry, the coal industry and the huge corporate polluters who own them.

“Even the inadequate bill before the Congress has been postponed until the spring,” McKibben said, “which in my political calendar is a little too close to the election to be very comfortable. We are getting no leadership from the president, rhetorical or otherwise. All the problems are obvious. The only good news is that there is finally something that looks like the glimmer of a movement.”

It is incumbent on all of us to find out where the nearest coal-powered plant is located—the one closest to me is in Hamilton, N.J.—and begin to organize to shut it down nonviolently. Princeton, where I live, is also home to NRG Energy, the ninth-biggest coal energy producer in the United States. A map of the nation’s coal-fired plants can be found here.

“Coal is the key commodity,” McKibben said. “The ability to cease the combustion of coal will be the thing that decides whether or not we go over the precipice meteorologically in the decades ahead.”

“It is unlikely that the environmental movement, or any other movement, will come up with as much cash as those industries,” McKibben said of the corporations he opposes. “ExxonMobil made more money last year than any company in the history of money. We better not compete in that currency. We better find something else to compete in. The only thing I can think of is bodies, creativity and passion. These are the sort of things, with all their strengths, the Exxons of the world tend to lack.”

McKibben, along with the writer and activist Wendell Berry, organized a mass act of civil disobedience conducted last March against a coal-fired power plant in Washington, D.C., near the White House. Thousands of demonstrators from around the country arrived to see that in anticipation of the protest a promise had been made to convert the plant from coal to natural gas. But there are over 600 more coal plants to close. And McKibben said that local and regional leaders need to rise up to organize against coal.

McKibben and Berry embrace civility and nonviolence. Protesters in Washington last March were enjoined to arrive “in their Sunday best.”

“If we are going to use civil disobedience we need to reclaim it from people who enjoy taunting the police and showing off,” McKibben said.

“I spent last Sunday night out on Boston Common with hundreds and hundreds of young people from across Massachusetts who were willing to very, very peacefully and unaggressively risk arrest, and in fact we were all cited [by the police] before the evening was done,” he went on. “They were sleeping in Boston Common and refusing to sleep in their dorms for the rest of the fall because [the dormitories] are powered by dirt energy. They have been lobbying for a bill in the Massachusetts Statehouse to close down all the coal-fired power plants within the next 10 years. There were students from every campus. The biggest contingent came from Clark in Worcester. The prize was whoever brought the most students got to have me sleep in their tent.”

McKibben and Berry are right. Nonviolent civil disobedience is the only tool that might work. If we mirror the violence employed by the instruments of state security we will become corrupt, as they are, and obliterate the moral high ground that attracts followers to any movement and sustains the long night of resistance. Violence is a poison that infects all those who use it, even in what can be defined as a just cause. And nothing could make ExxonMobil or the coal industry happier than to see shop windows broken, cars set afire and police lines rushed. The moment we resort to violence the corporate state wins. It will gleefully crush us like flies in the name of law and order and national security. The temptation to violence, especially given the passivity of most of us and the hypocrisy of our ruling elite, including Obama, will mount as climate change begins to create social and political unrest. But it must be resisted. This will be a long, long struggle. The coal companies will only be the start. The other corporations that have disempowered the citizenry, created a state of neo-feudalism and turned our democracy into a sham will be next.

“We are past the point where we are going to stop global warming,” McKibben said. “It is happening already, and more of it is coming no matter what we do. One of our jobs is to start figuring out how to cope with it. We need to build the kind of communities that can deal with that. The key question is scale. Communities need to be smaller. Our way of thinking about the world has to shrink. At the same time we need a global movement to continue this fight to bring carbon emissions under some kind of control. If we don’t, the kind of change we are talking about over the next decades is so big there is no way to adapt … no matter what we do, no matter how wonderfully organic your community has become. Communities still require water. People don’t quite understand what three or four or five degrees increase in the temperature of the planet will mean. One degree was enough to melt the Arctic. This was a bad sign.”

“Nothing important is going to come out of Copenhagen,” McKibben warned, “just a lot of spin. … [Obama’s] vast spin machine will be in full gear. There is no obvious route out of all this. We have started exploring mainly popular movements, and hopefully we have introduced a wild card into this game. Our plans are not even plans at this point. It is easier said than done. We shut down one coal-fired power plant and not a very big one. There are 600 left in the country. I don’t fancy myself up to the task of figuring out how to shut them all down. Hopefully some people will begin to do it.”

Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig every Monday, is a former Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times, where he shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism. Hedges also received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is the author of nine books.

Link:  http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/refuse_allegiance_to_coal_20091123/