We won a victory in March when over 100,000 people helped make climate change the number1 issue for this summit - but the resistance from vested interests is rising. The summit is days away. Please join me in signing the petition here:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/climate_g8/tf.php
Thanks!
Jason
But our President has basically told Chávez to take his cheaper oil and stick it up his pipeline. Before I explain why Bush has done so, let me explain why Chávez has the power to pull it off—and the method in the seeming madness of his “take-my-oil-please!” deal.
Venezuela, Chávez told me, has more oil than Saudi Arabia. A nutty boast? Not by a long shot. In fact, his surprising claim comes from a most surprising source: the U.S. Department of Energy. In an internal report, the DOE estimates that Venezuela has five times the Saudis’ reserves.
However, most of Venezuela’s mega-horde of crude is in the form of “extra-heavy” oil—liquid asphalt—which is ghastly expensive to pull up and refine. Oil has to sell above $30 a barrel to make the investment in extra-heavy oil worthwhile. A big dip in oil’s price—and, after all, oil cost only $18 a barrel six years ago—would bankrupt heavy-oil investors. Hence Chávez’s offer: Drop the price to $50—and keep it there. That would guarantee Venezuela’s investment in heavy oil.
But the ascendance of Venezuela within OPEC necessarily means the decline of the power of the House of Saud. And the Bush family wouldn’t like that one bit. It comes down to “petro-dollars.” When George W. ferried then-Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah of Saudi Arabia around the Crawford ranch in a golf cart it wasn’t because America needs Arabian oil. The Saudis will always sell us their petroleum. What Bush needs is Saudi petro-dollars. Saudi Arabia has, over the past three decades, kindly recycled the cash sucked from the wallets of American SUV owners and sent much of the loot right back to New York to buy U.S. Treasury bills and other U.S. assets.
The Gulf potentates understand that in return for lending the U.S. Treasury the cash to fund George Bush’s $2 trillion rise in the nation’s debt, they receive protection in return. They lend us petro-dollars, we lend them the 82nd Airborne.
Chávez would put an end to all that. He’ll sell us oil relatively cheaply—but intends to keep the petro-dollars in Latin America. Recently, Chávez withdrew $20 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve and, at the same time, lent or committed a like sum to Argentina, Ecuador, and other Latin American nations.
Chávez, notes The Wall Street Journal, has become a “tropical IMF.” And indeed, as the Venezuelan president told me, he wants to abolish the Washington-based International Monetary Fund, with its brutal free-market diktats, and replace it with an “International Humanitarian Fund,” an IHF, or more accurately, an International Hugo Fund. In addition, Chávez wants OPEC to officially recognize Venezuela as the cartel’s reserve leader, which neither the Saudis nor Bush will take kindly to.
Politically, Venezuela is torn in two. Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution,” a close replica of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—a progressive income tax, public works, social security, cheap electricity—makes him wildly popular with the poor. And most Venezuelans are poor. His critics, a four-centuries’ old white elite, unused to sharing oil wealth, portray him as a Castro-hugging anti-Christ.
Chávez’s government, which used to brush off these critics, has turned aggressive on them. I challenged Chávez several times over charges brought against Súmate, his main opposition group. The two founders of the nongovernmental organization, which led the recall campaign against Chávez, face eight years in prison for taking money from the Bush Administration and the International Republican [Party] Institute. No nation permits foreign funding of political campaigns, but the charges (no one is in jail) seem like a heavy hammer to use on the minor infractions of these pathetic gadflies.
Bush’s reaction to Chávez has been a mix of hostility and provocation. Washington supported the coup attempt against Chávez in 2002, and Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld have repeatedly denounced him. The revised National Security Strategy of the United States of America, released in March, says, “In Venezuela, a demagogue awash in oil money is undermining democracy and seeking to destabilize the region.”
So when the Reverend Pat Robertson, a Bush ally, told his faithful in August 2005 that Chávez has to go, it was not unreasonable to assume that he was articulating an Administration wish. “If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him,” Robertson said, “I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war . . . and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”
There are only two ways to defeat the rise of Chávez as the New Abdullah of the Americas. First, the unattractive option: Cut the price of oil below $30 a barrel. That would make Chávez’s crude worthless. Or, option two: Kill him.
Q: Your opponents are saying that you are beginning a slow-motion dictatorship. Is that what we are seeing?
Hugo Chávez: They have been saying that for a long time. When they’re short of ideas, any excuse will do as a vehicle for lies. That is totally false. I would like to invite the citizens of Great Britain and the citizens of the U.S. and the citizens of the world to come here and walk freely through the streets of Venezuela, to talk to anyone they want, to watch television, to read the papers. We are building a true democracy, with human rights for everyone, social rights, education, health care, pensions, social security, and jobs.
Q: Some of your opponents are being charged with the crime of taking money from George Bush. Will you send them to jail?
Chávez: It’s not up to me to decide that. We have the institutions that do that. These people have admitted they have received money from the government of the United States. It’s up to the prosecutors to decide what to do, but the truth is that we can’t allow the U.S. to finance the destabilization of our country. What would happen if we financed somebody in the U.S. to destabilize the government of George Bush? They would go to prison, certainly.
Q: How do you respond to Bush’s charge that you are destabilizing the region and interfering in the elections of other Latin American countries?
Chávez: Mr. Bush is an illegitimate President. In Florida, his brother Jeb deleted many black voters from the electoral registers. So this President is the result of a fraud. Not only that, he is also currently applying a dictatorship in the U.S. People can be put in jail without being charged. They tap phones without court orders. They check what books people take out of public libraries. They arrested Cindy Sheehan because of a T-shirt she was wearing demanding the return of the troops from Iraq. They abuse blacks and Latinos. And if we are going to talk about meddling in other countries, then the U.S. is the champion of meddling in other people’s affairs. They invaded Guatemala, they overthrew Salvador Allende, invaded Panama and the Dominican Republic. They were involved in the coup d’état in Argentina thirty years ago.
Q: Is the U.S. interfering in your elections here?
Chávez: They have interfered for 200 years. They have tried to prevent us from winning the elections, they supported the coup d’état, they gave millions of dollars to the coup plotters, they supported the media, newspapers, outlaw movements, military intervention, and espionage. But here the empire is finished, and I believe that before the end of this century, it will be finished in the rest of the world. We will see the burial of the empire of the eagle.
Q: You don’t interfere in the elections of other nations in Latin America?
Chávez: Absolutely not. I concern myself with Venezuela. However, what’s going on now is that some rightwing movements are transforming me into a pawn in the domestic politics of their countries, by making statements that are groundless. About candidates like Morales [of Bolivia], for example. They said I financed the candidacy of President Lula [of Brazil], which is totally false. They said I financed the candidacy of Kirchner [of Argentina], which is totally false. In Mexico, recently, the rightwing party has used my image for its own profit. What’s happened is that in Latin America there is a turn to the left. Latin Americans have gotten tired of the Washington consensus—a neoliberalism that has aggravated misery and poverty.
Q: You have spent millions of dollars of your nation’s oil wealth throughout Latin America. Are you really helping these other nations or are you simply buying political support for your regime?
Chávez: We are brothers and sisters. That’s one of the reasons for the wrath of the empire. You know that Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world. And the biggest gas reserves in this hemisphere, the eighth in the world. Up until seven years ago, Venezuela was a U.S. oil colony. All of our oil was going up to the north, and the gas was being used by the U.S. and not by us. Now we are diversifying. Our oil is helping the poor. We are selling to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, some Central American countries, Uruguay, Argentina.
Q: And the Bronx?
Chávez: In the Bronx it is a donation. In all the cases I just mentioned before, it is trade. However, it’s not free trade, just fair commerce. We also have an international humanitarian fund as a result of oil revenues.
Q: Why did George Bush turn down your help for New Orleans after the hurricane?
Chávez: You should ask him, but from the very beginning of the terrible disaster of Katrina, our people in the U.S., like the president of CITGO, went to New Orleans to rescue people. We were in close contact by phone with Jesse Jackson. We hired buses. We got food and water. We tried to protect them; they are our brothers and sisters. Doesn’t matter if they are African, Asian, Cuban, whatever.
Q: Are you replacing the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as “Daddy Big Bucks”?
Chávez: I do wish that the IMF and the World Bank would disappear soon.
Q: And it would be the Bank of Hugo?
Chávez: No. The International Humanitarian Bank. We are just creating an alternative way to conduct financial exchange. It is based on cooperation. For example, we send oil to Uruguay for their refinery and they are paying us with cows.
Q: Milk for oil.
Chávez: That’s right. Milk for oil. The Argentineans also pay us with cows. And they give us medical equipment to combat cancer. It’s a transfer of technology. We also exchange oil for software technology. Uruguay is one of the biggest producers of software. We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade. We believe in fair trade and exchange, not competition but cooperation. I’m not giving away oil for free. Just using oil, first to benefit our people, to relieve poverty. For a hundred years we have been one of the largest oil-producing countries in the world but with a 60 percent poverty rate and now we are canceling the historical debt.
Q: Speaking of the free market, you’ve demanded back taxes from U.S. oil companies. You have eliminated contracts for North American, British, and European oil companies. Are you trying to slice out the British and American oil companies from Venezuela?
Chávez: No, we don’t want them to go, and I don’t think they want to leave the country, either. We need each other. It’s simply that we have recovered our oil sovereignty. They didn’t pay taxes. They didn’t pay royalties. They didn’t give an account of their actions to the government. They had more land than had previously been established in the contracts. They didn’t comply with the agreed technology exchange. They polluted the environment and didn’t pay anything towards the cleanup. They now have to comply with the law.
Q: You’ve said that you imagine the price of oil rising to $100 dollars per barrel. Are you going to use your new oil wealth to squeeze the planet?
Chávez: No, no. We have no intention of squeezing anyone. Now, we have been squeezed and very hard. Five hundred years of squeezing us and stifling us, the people of the South. I do believe that demand is increasing and supply is dropping and the large reservoirs are running out. But it’s not our fault. In the future, there must be an agreement between the large consumers and the large producers.
Q: What happens when the oil money runs out, what happens when the price of oil falls as it always does? Will the Bolivarian revolution of Hugo Chávez simply collapse because there’s no money to pay for the big free ride?
Chávez: I don’t think it will collapse, in the unlikely case of oil running out today. The revolution will survive. It does not rely solely on oil for its survival. There is a national will, there is a national idea, a national project. However, we are today implementing a strategic program called the Oil Sowing Plan: using oil wealth so Venezuela can become an agricultural country, a tourist destination, an industrialized country with a diversified economy. We are investing billions of dollars in the infrastructure: power generators using thermal energy, a large railway, roads, highways, new towns, new universities, new schools, recuperating land, building tractors, and giving loans to farmers. One day we won’t have any more oil, but that will be in the twenty-second century. Venezuela has oil for another 200 years.
Q: But the revolution can come to an end if there’s another coup and it succeeds. Do you believe Bush is still trying to overthrow your government?
Chávez: He would like to, but what you want is one thing, and what you cannot really obtain is another.
Investigative reporter Greg Palast, who interviewed President Hugo Chávez for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), is the author of “Armed Madhouse: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War," from which this adaptedThe press dispatches bring the news; it belongs to the Astute Class, the first of its kind to be constructed in Great Britain in more than two decades.
“A nuclear reactor will allow it to navigate without refueling during its 25 years of service. Since it makes its own oxygen and drinking water, it can circumnavigate the globe without needing to surface,” was the statement to the BBC by Nigel Ward, head of the shipyards.
“It’s a mean-looking beast”, says another.
“Looming above us is a construction shed 12 stories high. Within it are 3 nuclear-powered submarines at different stages of construction,” assures yet another.
Someone says that “it can observe the movements of cruisers in New York Harbor right from the English Channel, drawing close to the coast without being detected and listen to conversations on cell phones”. “In addition, it can transport special troops in mini-subs that, at the same time, will be able to fire lethal Tomahawk missiles for distances of 1,400 miles", a fourth person declares.
El Mercurio, the Chilean newspaper, emphatically spreads the news.
The British Royal Navy declares that it will be one of the most advanced in the world. The first of them will be launched on June 8 and will go into service in January of 2009.
It can transport up to 38 Tomahawk cruise missiles and Spearfish torpedoes, capable of destroying a large warship. It will possess a permanent crew of 98 sailors who will even be able to watch movies on giant plasma screens.
The new Astute will carry the latest generation of Block 4 Tomahawk torpedoes, which can be reprogrammed in flight. It will be the first one not having a system of conventional periscopes and, instead, will be using fiber optics, infrared waves and thermal imaging.
“BAE Systems, the armaments manufacturer, will build two other submarines of the same class,” AP reported. The total cost of the three submarines, according to calculations that will certainly be below the mark, is 7.5 billion dollars.
What a feat for the British! The intelligent and tenacious people of that nation will surely not feel any sense of pride. What is most amazing is that with such an amount of money, 75 thousand doctors could be trained to care for 150 million people, assuming that the cost of training a doctor would be one-third of what it costs in the United States. You could build 3,000 polyclinics, outfitted with sophisticated equipment, ten times what our country possesses.
Cuba is currently training thousands of young people from other countries as medical doctors.
In any remote African village, a Cuban doctor can impart medical knowledge to any youth from the village or from the surrounding municipality who has the equivalent of a 12th-grade education, using videos and computers energized by a small solar panel; the youth does not even have to leave his hometown, nor does he need to be contaminated with the consumer habits of a large city.
The important thing is the patients who are suffering from malaria or any other of the typical and unmistakable diseases that the student will be seeing together the doctor.
The method has been tested with surprising results. The knowledge and practical experience accumulated for years have no possible comparison.
The non-lucrative practice of medicine is capable of winning over all noble hearts.
Since the beginning of the Revolution, Cuba has been engaged in training doctors, teachers and other professionals; with a population of less than 12 million inhabitants, today we have more Comprehensive General Medicine specialists than all the doctors in sub-Saharan Africa where the population exceeds 700 million people.
We must bow our heads in awe after reading the news about the English submarine. It teaches us, among other things, about the sophisticated weapons that are needed to maintain the untenable order developed by the United States imperial system.
We cannot forget that for centuries, and until recently, England was called the Queen of the Seas. Today, what remains of that privileged position is merely a fraction of the hegemonic power of her ally and leader, the United States.
Churchill said: Sink the Bismarck! Today, Blair says: Sink whatever remains of Great Britain’s prestige!
For that purpose, or for the holocaust of the species, is what his “marvelous submarine” will be good for.
Fidel Castro Ruz
May 21, 2007
5:00 p.m.An alternative to fossil fuel
We all know that driving is a major contributor to global warming - for the average UK citizen 19% of their carbon footprint comes from car use. But what if we could power our vehicles with something other than fossil fuels? This is the tempting prospect of ‘biofuels’ - fuels derived from organic matter.
Bioethanol, used as a substitute for petrol, is usually made from sugar beat or corn, whilst bio-diesel is produced from various plant oils. Brazil has long used ethanol extensively, with half of its sugar cane crop going into transport fuel. Most cars can burn petrol blended with up to 10% bioethanol without any modifications to the engine, and some new cars can burn pure bioethanol. Biodiesel can be used in place of normal diesel without modification to the engine.
The hope is that both offer the potential of cutting greenhouse gas emissions quickly with minimal modification to existing vehicles and fuel infrastructure. A recent study conducted by Sheffield Hallam University suggested CO2 savings in the region of 70% for biodiesel compared to petroleum diesel.[1] In the hope of capitalising on reduced emissions European Union law has set a target that by 2010 all vehicle fuels must be blended with 5.75% biofuels. According to a recent report by the Worldwatch Institute biofuels can significantly reduce global dependence on oil - and biofuel production has doubled since 2001.
So why has well-known environmental campaigner George Monbiot called biofuels “the most destructive crop on earth”?[2]
Do the numbers add up?
In the US, with federal subsidies for ethanol production, at least 39 new ethanol plants will be completed over the next year, adding 30% to current production and pushing the US passed Brazil as the world’s largest ethanol producer.[3] But with world biofuel production at 670,000 barrels per day, that is only equivalent to about 1 % of the global transport fuel market.[4]
Brazil produces 10% of its entire fuel consumption from just 3% of its agricultural land – an attractive prospect. But Brazilians drive far less than Europeans and Americans, their crop yields are higher due to climate and soil fertility, and their population density is lower than in the West.[5] The Worldwatch study estimates that for the US to achieve that 10% target would require that 30% of its agricultural land be dedicated to biofuels - and for Europe a wholly unrealistic 72% would be needed.
Ethanol Gold Rush
The reality is that 15% of the US’s corn crop is allocated toward ethanol production, and this has already caused corn prices to rise 30%, causing an across-the-board increase in food prices[6]. Using crops normally grown for the food for fuel instead creates massive increases in demand and hence large price increases. For the US to replace the oil it imports from the Persian Gulf with corn-based ethanol would take at least half the nation’s farmland.[7] Some experts in the US are arguing that at the current pace of development, ethanol production could strain food supplies and force the use of marginal farmland set aside for conservation. It takes four to five gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol and ethanol production threatens to deplete groundwater aquifers in the US Midwest, which also supply agriculture.
Despite these many problems it is not even clear that ethanol will actually reduce carbon emissions. Fossil fuels are used at every stage of the process from growing corn with petroleum-based fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, to oil to run tractors, to natural gas used in the distillation process to turn corn into ethanol through to transporting the ethanol to blending facilities by truck and rail. Several studies show that obtaining ethanol from corn actually consumes more energy than ethanol provides!
Lester Brown has described the boom in bioethanol as a competition between the 800 million people in the world who own cars with the 3 billion people who struggle to feed themselves on less than $2 a day. The corn required to fill an SUV tank with bioethanol just once could feed one person for an entire year[8].
Palm Oil Controversy
In Europe there is no way to meet the modest 2010 target for blending fossil fuels with biofuel utilising crops from European land, so the target will be met with massive imports of vegetable oils.
Importing vegetable oils might sound benign compared to drilling more oil wells – but the reality is far from it, involving the destruction of virgin rainforests and the potential extinction of the orang-utans that live in them. Palm oil produces significantly better yields of biofuel per hectare than other crops and so is the crop of choice for an international biodiesel market. It is grown mainly in rainforest areas in South East Asia and development of new plantations has resulted in the destruction of large areas of virgin forests with high conservation value and rich biodiversity. Moreover the destruction is occurring at a time when it is essential that the world preserves rainforest or face climate chaos.
Malaysia and Indonesia, which together dominate the world market for palm oil, announced a joint plan in July to set aside 40% of their palm oil output for biodiesel production.[9]
Palm oil is also a common ingredient in processed food and cosmetic products and in the UK Friends of the Earth and Co-operative Insurance have worked hard to persuade all the biggest UK food retailers to join the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil, which is seeking to establish standards for the sustainable production of the oil. The use of palm oil as a replacement for crude oil is unsustainable and will cause more problems than it solves. This is also the case for soy oil coming from farms in Brazil - where the Amazon rainforest is being cleared to make way for the expansion of huge fields growing soy.
Technology to the rescue?
Researchers are discovering ways to produce bioethanol without using food crops, and instead focusing on converting cellulose-rich organic matter into ethanol. Cellulose is the main structural component of all green plants and developing an efficient process to convert cellulose into ethanol could enable the use of non-food materials such as straw, crop residues like stalks, hardwood chips, even paper, cardboard and food waste. Switchgrass, a wild grass the grows in the US on land unsuitable for food crops has also been suggested as a feedstock and some suggest cellulosic ethanol could provide twice the yield of current corn ethanol[10].
As for biodiesel there are potential substitutes for environmentally damaging palm oil that look promising, such as Jatropha and microalgae, but more development of these is still needed.
One emerging technology even utilises algae to convert the CO2 produced by power plants into biofuel, creating a cycle that takes the carbon from the smokestack to the petrol tank before it enters the atmosphere[11].
Exciting though these technologies are they still cannot provide the immediate cuts in green house gas emissions needed if we are to tackle climate change - we simply cannot afford to wait in hope for a technological fix.
Sustainable Biofuels
This is not to say all biofuels is unsustainable - but we cannot simply replace an international market in oil with one in biofuels. Biofuels are not a panacea which enable ‘business as usual’ – the profligate use of energy and the careless waste of resources.
For example, Green Gold Biodiesel in Manchester, the first dedicated biodiesel garage in the UK, follows best practice in producing biodiesel using renewable feedstocks, and wherever possible used cooking oil. Utilising a resource that would otherwise be waste allows a far greater reduction in carbon dioxide emissions than for virgin oil The British Association for Biofuels and Oils estimates the volume of waste cooking oil in the UK at 100,000 tonnes a year[12] - but that is enough to meet only one 380th of our demand for road transport fuel[13].
Ultimately, it is not just the fuel that needs to change; it is the lifestyle that makes use of it.
[4] Biofuels for Transportation: Global Potential and Implications for Sustainable Agriculture and Energy in the 21st Century
[6] “Ethanol production comes at a high price” Rutland Herald, September 10, 2006
[7] ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO “Boom in Ethanol Reshapes Economy of Heartland” New York Times June 25, 2006
[8] George Monbiot “Biodiesel enthusiasts have accidentally invented the most carbon-intensive fuel on earth” The Guardian 6th December 2005
[9] Fred Pearce “Fuels gold: Big risks of the biofuel revolution” New Scientist, 25 September 2006
[10] Fred Pearce “Fuels gold: Big risks of the biofuel revolution” New Scientist, 25 September 2006
[11] Phil Mckenna “Biofuel made from power plant CO2 “ New Scientist, 6 October 2006
[13] George Monbiot. “Biodiesel enthusiasts have accidentally invented the most carbon-intensive fuel on earth” The Guardian 6th December 2005
