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Two weeks ago this column covered the controversy surrounding the Lear Briefing, which presents a scenario speculating that the government has been suppressing the facts about alien contact because the truth - in part, that aliens are abducting and dissecting humans like lab rats - was too horrible to disclose. I suggested that rather than protecting the public from the scary truth, the cover-uppers are only protecting their own rear ends from the consequences of their illegal and treasonous actions.
Humanity faces a scarier reality than aliens, however, that will impact the lives of every person on earth. I refer to the global catastrophes brought about by rapid climate change due in part to greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels. The same knee-jerk reaction, to deny the truth rather than help people prepare and face up to it, seems to hold sway in the U.S. government. The motive once again appears to be to protect the power elite from the consequences of their short-sighted and selfish behavior.
In an April 4 article in the UK's Observer magazine, Anthony Barnett revealed an e-mail sent by George W. Bush's campaign workers to Republican congressman suggesting that they "deny, and deny aggressively" the bad news about global warming.
"It tells them how global warming has not been proved, air quality is 'getting better', the world's forests are 'spreading, not deadening', oil reserves are 'increasing, not decreasing', and the 'world's water is cleaner and reaching more people'," Barnett said.
"Among the memo's assertions are 'global warming is not a fact', 'links between air quality and asthma in children remain cloudy', and the US Environment Protection Agency is exaggerating when it says that at least 40 per cent of streams, rivers and lakes are too polluted for drinking, fishing or swimming."
Sources cited in the memo are tainted by ties to the fossil fuels industry. For example, it quotes an air quality report from Pacific Research Institute, which has received $130,000 from Exxon Mobil since 1998. It also quotes the controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg and Richard Lindzen, another "skeptic" who has taken money from the fossil fuel industry. They are the exception among most climate scientists, who mostly insist that global warming is real.
"But probably the most influential voice behind the memo is Frank Luntz, a Republican Party strategist. In a leaked 2002 memo, Luntz said: 'The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.'" This is a clear and candid admission that political ideology takes precedence over hard scientific truth. Incidentally, the English government's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, attacked Luntz last month for being too close to Exxon, Barnett said.
King said publicly early his year that climate change is a far worse danger than international terrorism. Canada's environment minister David Anderson said the same thing in a Feb. 9 Reuters article. "Current preoccupation is with terrorism, but in the long term climate change will outweigh terrorism as an issue for the international community," he said. "Terrorism will come and go, it has in the past...and it's very important. But climate change is going to make some very fundamental changes to human existence on the planet." This is despite both their governments' unstinting support of Bush's war on terrorism and invasion of Iraq.
The "debate" over the science behind global warming is completely bogus, because the effects are already being felt. Last summer more than 10,000 people, mostly elderly, died from extreme heat in France alone. Then winter temperatures reached record lows across the northern hemisphere, causing more than a dozen deaths. Most recently, a hurricane struck Brazil, causing much damage and a number of deaths, although hurricanes have never appeared in the southern hemisphere before in history. So far this year the body count from unprecedented extreme weather far exceeds that from terrorist bombings or the war in Iraq.
Scientists have been warning for years that while global warming will cause some areas to heat up, others will get much colder, as in the ice ages of times past. Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country cites Geoffrey Lean in The Independent that Britain and parts of Europe may be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime. "Scientists at the U.S. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute have detected a change in the Gulf Stream circulation of the North Atlantic 'of remarkable amplitude' which is 'the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments.' The Gulf Stream is what keeps Europe's weather mild; without this, it will have the same weather as central Canada, which is on the same latitude," Strieber said.
"When the Gulf Stream suddenly turned off about 12,700 years ago, it brought about a 1,300-year ice age. Britain had continuous permafrost, and icebergs existed as far south as Portugal. Droughts struck worldwide, including in western parts of the U.S." he said. Strieber together with radio host Art Bell wrote the book The Coming Global Superstorm that predicted these changes. A major movie based on the book, "The Day After Tomorrow," is coming out in May.
Military planners in the Pentagon would certainly not be considered tree-huggers or liberal Chicken Littles, but they came up with a
study that contradicts the Bush administration's rosy view. Pentagon planner Andrew Marshall, who heads up the DoD Office of Net Assessment and has been an "out of the box" theoretician for the department since 1973, last year ordered up a long-range forecast of how a rapid onset of global warming could affect the security of the United States and its allies.
The study, written by analysts Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, provides a dire scenario of potential catastrophic impacts from global warming on the natural resources, political and economic systems and day-to-day life not only of the United States but the entire world. This would lead to wars and threats of wars over resources, they said. An abridged version of the study was originally published by Fortune magazine.
Stephen Greer of the Disclosure Project published a paper on his website that criticizes the "war on terror" as being driven by Western corporations' addiction to oil, despite the fact that alternative energy technologies existed as early as 50 years ago. If it weren't for America's thirst for oil, we wouldn't be in the Middle East stirring up animosity against us to begin with, he says.
"The real tragedy in all of this is that we have not needed oil, coal or nuclear power since at least the 1950s - and most likely long before that. Replacements for oil, and technologies to greatly increase the efficiency of the internal combustion engine, have existed for decades - only to be ruthlessly suppressed," he says.
"In February of 2003, just before the US went into Iraq, a friend of the Bush family told me '…of course, this is really about securing the second largest oil field in the world, and everyone knows it.' Initially appalled, I listened as this gentleman explained how, with China rapidly industrializing (along with India) that our strategic interests required that we 'liberate' the Iraqi oil fields, and get them up to maximum production.
"The Big Lie that we have no other options and therefore must continue to find new sources of oil, and protect vital western interests related to oil in the Mid-east, must be exposed and put to rest. Granted, a multi-trillion dollar component of the global economy is now, sadly, dependent (or shall we say addicted) to oil, but this can be no excuse for the lack of bold leadership. The multi-faceted crisis of terrorism, petro-fascism, environmental decay, global warming, and the widening disparity between wealthy and poor nations has its roots in our dependence on oil and the excesses and abuses of power related thereto," he says.
"More than one scientist with whom we are now working has been threatened, had his work sabotaged or confiscated and generally terrorized into a paralyzing silence. This, while we march into one oil war after another. This operation, a hybrid trans-national entity that has shadowy ties to the military, intelligence, laboratory, corporate and institutional communities (and yet is controlled by none) operates like a highly functional organized crime group, and has ruled by terror for decades. Indeed the Big Terror is the one that remains unacknowledged and unchallenged, while we dash around the world chasing the blowback from our failed, decades-long policy of oil dependency," Greer writes.
Greer says Space Energy Access Systems, Inc. (SEAS) that he founded is in contact with scientists capable of developing technologies to completely replace fossil fuels. "We estimate that a generation one version of such an energy generating system can be ready for widespread application in 12-36 months. But such an undertaking, requiring millions of dollars in basic research and development funds, remains unsupported by either the government or financial community."
It is not a matter of ideology, but of simple common sense to prepare for inevitable disasters. The war on terror has been called a matter of national survival, but survival depends far more on adapting to changing conditions. A mindless adherence to technologies and policies long after they have become obsolete is a certain recipe for national destruction.
If the current administration fails to act while there's still time, its failure will be remembered and condemned in history far more than its successes in fighting terrorism. It won't be long before all humanity will be engaged in a fight for survival that will push terrorism aside as a minor issue. Will America be remembered as part of the problem, or part of the solution?
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