The remarks can generally be split into two groups based on senders and views: firstly, individuals and environmentalist associations who above all protest the afore-mentioned plans for the Reykjanes peninsula; secondly, companies and institutions with vested interests in the further heavy industrialization of Iceland who demand that the Master Plan’s second phase goes unaltered through parliament — that is, as it was before the parliamentary resolution was presented, in which the planned Þjórsá dams and other hydro power plants are included in the exploitation category.

One of the remarks sent in differs from the others as it evaluates energy production and nature conservation in a larger, long-term context. That remark, written by Helga Katrín Tryggvadóttir, MA in development studies, is published here below, translated from Icelandic by Saving Iceland.

I find myself inclined to make a few remarks regarding the Industries Committee’s discussion about the Energy Master Plan. My remarks do not concern particular natural areas but rather the comprehensive ideas regarding the scope and nature of the protection and exploitation of natural areas. Since the making of the Energy Master Plan begun, much has changed for the better as researches and knowledge on energy production and nature conservation continuously advance. The social pattern as well as opinions on nature conservation have also changed rapidly since the first draft for an Energy Master Plan was published, and the emphasis on nature conservation constantly increases. With this in mind it is necessary to take into account that during the next years, this emphasis on nature conservation is likely to increase even further. Therefore it is important for the Industries Committee to remember that keeping natural areas in pending does not prevent future utilization, whereas areas exploited today cannot be protected tomorrow.

Unsustainable Utilization

The many negative impacts of geothermal and hydro power plants have not been discussed thoroughly enough in Iceland. This can probably be explained by the the fact that these are renewable energy sources and thereby, people tend to view them as positive options for energy production. Thus we often hear that it is better to operate energy intensive industries here, using renewable energy sources, rather than in countries where the same industries are powered by electricity produced by coals and oil. However, when these issues are looked at it more accurately, we have to be aware of the fact that despite hydro and geothermal power’s renewability, their current utilization in Iceland is by no means sustainable.

Using the hydraulic head of glacial rivers, hydro power plants require reservoirs which deplete vegetated land, the reservoirs get filled with mud and by time the area becomes an eroded land. When it comes to geothermal areas, exploited for energy production, the seizure of fluid is much greater than the inflow into the geothermal reservoir and therefore the geothermal power dries up by time. At that point the area has to rest for a time still unknown in the geothermal sciences. Thus it is clear that although we are dealing with renewable energy sources, they do not at all allow for infinite energy production, and additionally the power plants themselves entail environmental destruction. It is clear that the utilization of these resources has to be executed very carefully, and preferably, all further utilization plans should be put on hold until it is possible to learn from the experience of the plants built in the very recent past.

CO2 Emission

A lot of emphasis has been put on the idea that Iceland possesses huge amounts of “green energy,” meaning that this energy does not burn fossil fuels. Thereby it is assumed that no CO2 emission takes place. This is, however, far from the truth: in 2008 the CO2 emission from geothermal plants in Iceland amounted to 185 thousand tons, which is 6% of the country’s total CO2 emission¹. Hydro dams also add to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere: big reservoirs cause the drowning of vegetated land, wherein rotting vegetation emits methane gas, increasing global warming. It is estimated that about 7% of carbon emitted by humans come from such constructions². The sediment of glacial rivers affects the ocean’s ecosystems and nourishes algae vegetation by the seashore. Marine organisms play an important part in extracting carbon from the atmosphere; it is estimated that such vegetation extracts about 15 times more of CO2 than a woodland of the same size³. Annually, the ocean is believed to extract 11 billion tons of CO2 emitted by men⁴. By damming glacial rivers, entailing disturbance of their sediment and of algae vegetation, Icelanders are not only threatening the fish stocks around the country, and thus the country’s fishing industry, but also further contributing to global warming in a way which is more dangerous than deforestation, though the latter has undergone much harsher criticism worldwide than the destruction of oceanic ecosystems.

Geothermal Power Plants

In the Energy Master Plan’s second phase, possible geothermal power plants are listed in 20 out of the 25 highest seats of exploitation. If the planned hydro dams, Hvamms- and Holtavirkjun, in river Þjórsá will be kept in pending — which I rejoice as a resident of the Skeiða- og Gnúpverjahreppur region — geothermal power plants will occupy 22 out of the 25 seats. Due to the fact that so little is known about the long-term impacts of geothermal power plants, this ordering is a matter of concern. Before further construction takes place, it is necessary to wait until more experience is gained from the already operating geothermal power plants. Many of the problems connected to these plants are still unsolved, for instance the dangerous material in the plants’ run-of water as well as their polluting emissions. This has to be taken into consideration, especially near the capital area of Reykjavík where sulphur pollution is already very high⁵.

It also has to be taken into account that geothermal energy production is not sustainable, as an geothermal area’s heat supply eventually dries up. Their usage allows for 50 years of production, which of course is a very limited amount of time. If the plan is to use such energy for industrial development it has to be kept in mind that 50 years pass very quickly, meaning that the jobs at stake are no long-term jobs. At the same time, such a short-term utilization encroaches on future generations’ right to utilize the geothermal energy sources, not to mention their right to utilize these areas by protecting them for outdoor activities and creation of knowledge, as Iceland’s geothermal areas are unique on a global scale. For the last weeks, we have witnessed how the already exploited geothermal areas, or those where test-drilling has taken place, have not at all been utilized in a way that goes together with tourism and outdoor activities, as the areas’ appearance and environment have been damaged on a large scale⁶.

Economical Arguments

When it comes to economical arguments, people often tend to call for short-term employment solutions, stating that it is important to construct as many possible power plants in the shortest time in order to create as many jobs as possible. The fact, however, is that a construction-driven economy will always lead to instability, and such instability is indeed the Icelandic economy’s largest bale. Above all, Iceland’s economy needs stability and a future vision that sees further than 10 years into the future. For a stable future economy to be built, it has to happen in a sustainable way, whereas continuous aggressive exploitation of the country’s natural resources will simply lead to an era of regular economic collapses. By putting such strong emphasis on the aggressive exploitation of hydro and geothermal resources, with the appendant construction bubbles, a situation of unemployment will be sustained, broken up by occasional and differently short-lived boom periods in between.

References:

1. Birna Sigrún Hallsdóttir, Kristín Harðardóttir, Jón Guðmundsson og Arnór Snorrason. 2009. National Inventory Report Iceland 2009 Submitted under the United Nations Framework Convention no Climate Change. Umhverfisstofnun.

2. Náttúruverndarsamtök Íslands ofl. 2011. Umsögn um drög að tillögu til þingsályktunar um áætlun um vernd og orkunýtingu landsvæða. (Download pdf. here.)

3.  Worldwatch Institute. 2011. Oceans Absorb Less Carbon Dioxide as Marine Systems Change.

4. The Guardian. 2009. Sea Absorbing Less CO2, Scientists Discover. 12. janúar 2009.

5. Náttúruverndarsamtök Íslands ofl. 2011. Umsögn um drög að tillögu til þingsályktunar um áætlun um vernd og orkunýtingu landsvæða.

6. Ómar Ragnarsson. 2012. Já, það varð svona og það verður svona. Morgunblaðið. 2012. Borteigar . „Verður þetta allt svona ?“ 5. maí 2012.

See also:

International Rivers. Problem With Big Dams.

International Union for Conservation of Nature. 2009. Ocean Carbon Central for Climate Change.

International Rivers and Friends of the Earth International have teamed up to create a state-of-the-art Google Earth 3-D tour and video narrated by Nigerian activist Nnimmo Bassey, winner of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award. The production was launched on the first day of the COP 17 climate meeting in Durban. The video and tour allow viewers to explore why dams are not the right answer to climate change, by learning about topics such as reservoir emissions, dam safety, and adaptation while visiting real case studies in Africa, the Himalayas and the Amazon.

Last spring ALCOA released the first draft of the joint environmental impact assessment for the proposed Bakki smelter and power plants at Krafla and Theistareykir. Recently Iceland’s National Planning Agency commented on the draft assessment in a damning commentary.

The agency stated that the environmental impacts of the project are high and cannot be mitigated. 17,000 ha of untouched wilderness will be affected. Greenhouse gas emissions of the project would constitute 14% of Iceland’s total. There is a great deal of uncertainty on the full impact of the planned power plants and particularly on how much geothermal energy can be sustainably produced. Finally, the assessed energy projects will not be able to fully power the smelter, with 140 MW of capacity missing.

This confirms three key points of critique on the smelter that we have been voicing for several years now.

Firstly, the environmental impact of the geothermal plants and drilling in the north is much greater than Alcoa has claimed.

Secondly, we have said that carbon emissions from the projects would be so high that Iceland would find it extremely difficult to meet its international obligations. If Iceland wishes to become an EU member, then this impact assessment will surely be the kiss of death for the Bakki project.

Thirdly, when the joint impact assessment was announced we insisted that possible dams in Skjalfandafljót, Jökulsá Eystri, Jökulsá Vestri and Jökulsá á Fjöllum (a 72 km2 reservoir is on the drawing boards!) should be assessed for environmental impact, because one or more of them would be needed for a 346.000-ton smelter.

Now our calculations, that the northern geothermal fields will not produce enough energy for the smelter, have been proven correct. The original proposal for the smelter was for 250.000 tons, but ALCOA have stated in international media that they intend to extend the Bakki smelter to 500.000. Whether or not this will happen, new dams need to be built if the smelter is pushed through. This will lead to a large amount of borrowing and capital inflow that will again destabilise the Icelandic economy, which is too small to deal with projects this size.

Saving Iceland’s energy calculations were published in Morgunblaðið (22 August 2008), and greenhouse gas calculations were published in an international book publication on green energy and on savingiceland.org. Other environmentalists in Iceland have also raised these issues.

However, Alcoa and the consecutive Icelandic governments have thus far ignored them.

They refuse to comment on where the required energy is going to come from.

They refuse to think about how the economy will respond to more huge projects.

They refuse to comment on how Iceland can keep its green and unspoiled reputation if so much of its landscape and rivers will be ruined and if greenhouse gas emissions sky-rocket.

They now even refuse to respond to the national planning agency, except that they have said they will simply ignore the environmental impact.

We hoped that this kind of arrogance had been gotten rid of by the fall of the government in 2009 but apparently it is still there.

Clarity and transparency is for a start needed now on this simple question: if there is going to be a 346.000-ton or more smelter at Bakki, where will the new dams be built?

References:

Development of Iceland’s Geothermal Energy Potential for Aluminium Production – A Critical Analysis

Sparking a World-wide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World. Editor: K. Abrahamsky. AK Press, 2010.

Jaap Krater is an ecological economist and a spokesperson of Saving Iceland

This article was first published in Morgunblaðið March 5 2011.

Social Forum Journey / Malmö-Belem-Istanbul

Abstract: This article looks at how the national mass protests against neoliberal regimes in Iceland, Tunisia, Egypt and other African and Arabic countries and the Wisconsin in the US are linked with the climate justice movement. Both national protests and the climate justice movement are developing unevenly. National protests in some hot spots, the climate campaigning more even all over the world. By looking at how countries like Denmark and its organized civil society acts it can be possible to understand how the struggle both for defensive goals and constructive solutions can strengthen each other by what lacked in Denmark but exists on the global level. That is solidarity against repression and building resistance which enables solutions uniting anti-neoliberal struggles in general and specific areas.

This is important both at transnational level and in countries that are more advanced in this struggle as well as those lagging far behind their objective potential like Denmark or Sweden. The challenge is how to combine the strength of the workers movement lacking a global democratic organization representing the working class also in the South and peasants, environmental, women and indigenous people who have established such global democratic organizations. The argument is that the key lies in combining the workers movements strength in defending the common interests with the offensive constructive program promoted by popular movements that have established global democratic organizations and organize solidarity against repression of all popular movements.

The commodification of all human beings and all of nature is at the core of the present development model. The resistance against this model is now enabling alternatives to emerge at both national and on specific fields also the transnational level ultimately paving the way for abolishing the present unsustainable development model. By bringing the two ways of challenging the present development model together and critically examine while also celebrating them it might be possible to find new ways of struggling and winning against the rulers of the world. Both the national uprising against authoritarian neoliberal and austerity regimes and the climate justice movement are part of the same democratic momentum questioning the global world order in all kind of countries all over the world.

The mass climate movement must go beyond the neoliberal agenda

Solutions to the climate crisis is a field were those holding on to the present development model are especially aggressive. They push for a new global land and air grabbing regime with the aim of oppressing the poor to give their fair share of the global commons to the rich and wealthy and into the hands of transnational corporations.

The incapacity of those in power due to the present development model to address global warming have caused growing wide-spread concern. In 1991 people in 70 countries on 500 places participated in international climate action days, in 2009 there were actions on 5000 places and last year 7000 places in almost every country on earth. This incapacity also have caused the rising of the climate justice movement which not only asks for action but also resistance against the present development model and promote constructive solutions beyond the limitations set by those in power.

A primary force behind this climate justice movement has been the anti-debt movement emerging from the riots against International Monetary Fund policies imposed on countries who are oppressed and been given the role of delivering their economic resources to those who already are rich owners of capital, riots that erupted in Peru in 1976 and Egypt in 1977 and since then spread all over the world.

Another force has been the resistance against development projects imposed on local communities in the interest of transnational corporations and the capitalists that owns them. This resistance erupted also at the end of the 1970s when the indigenous Katinga and Bontoc people started armed resistance with arrows and bows against the Chico dam project in the Philippines which was supposed to be financed by the World Bank. Many died in the struggle but the Katinga and Bontocs never gave up in spite of the violence and attempts at bribing their leaders gaining both local, national and international support. The conflict ended with victory paving the way for indigenous and other movements protesting against the present development model in all parts of the world. A movement of oppressed indigenous and local communities that have grown stronger and stronger which was expressed at the international Cochabamba gathering in Bolivia last year with 33 000 people calling for climate justice.

These strands in a global popular movement against the present development model together with the peasant, women’s and environmental movements formed in 2007 the Climate Justice Now! Network. Thus a system critical movement had been established as an alternative to the global coalition of well funded environmental and like minded foundations and other organizations often lacking democratic accountability like Greenpeace. A coalition that in different forms address global warming and other environmental issues as mainly technical and individual moral issues claiming that what is necessary is media attention and pressuring politicians but not changing any social order.

This coalition has been dominated by Western organizations lacking global democratic accountability while the climate justice movement builds on the oppressed peoples and global democratic popular movements like Jubilee South, Via Campesina, Friends of the Earth and Women’s World March. They all have a leadership very much from the third world and build on ideas of equal distribution of power in the movement instead of top-down management.

What is lacking is the perhaps most important movement in resisting the present development model or at least in defending peoples interests, the workers movement. But the trade union is the only larger global popular movement that has refused to build on democratic accountability towards the global working class- ITUC, the International Trade Union Confederation has instead chosen to be dominated by the working class in the rich and wealthy countries and no strong alternative to ITUC have emerged which the other popular movements can cooperate with for building a joint resistance and constructing alternatives to the present world order. ITUC promotes social dialogue with business, IMF and G-20 instead of organizing the global working class.

This was criticized at the Open World Conference against War and Exploitation held in Alger 27-29 novemeber 2010 with 400 mainly trade union participants. Abdel Majid Sidi Zaid. General secretary of the Algerian TUC (UGTA), stated in his inauguration speech that employed and people in common had disappeared from the economic agenda. The only thing that seems to count is to give tax payers money to the capitalists. Sidi Zaid criticized how ITUC gradually slipped into becoming a social partner with business, G-20 and governments instead of representing a different interest than that of the employer.

But the voices of North African and other third world working class cannot be heard in the way ITUC excludes the large working classes to have their proportionate say as only number of individual members is counting making it possible for the rich countries with smaller working class but higher percentage of enlisted member to dominate the international organization. This weakens the trade unions everywhere and so also their ability to cooperate with other movements who are independent and not necessarily sees a solution to every problem social partnership with business and government. Thus is the trade unions a problematic ally as their lack of global democracy in their main international organization effectively excludes the third world working class from influence, the same working class that is so necessary to have as allied for popular movements struggling for climate justice.

Without a strong international cooperation partner among the trade unions it is necessary to find other ways to win the majority against false solutions to the climate crisis and for a just transition. The strength of the climate justice movement so far has been several. The commitment of activists in indigenous struggles against exploitation or climate camps and other forms of struggle has a key role. That strong organizations with a multi issue interest in both social and environmental concerns have been able to cooperate in CJN is another factor. So are the well articulated arguments against false solutions like carbon trading, nuclear power or monoculture biofuel. But what is lacking is a program for solutions, for just transition of housing, industry, transport, agriculture, forestry and many other sectors. It is not enough to know what we are against. We need alos something to long for.

Such a programme is indivisibly linked with going beyond the neoliberal limitations set by the social partnership agenda. Without a clear idea of how to socially mobilize for just transition domestically and internationally the struggle for change will become fragmenticized and easy to diverge into ideas of socially neutral technological plans or moral appeals without substantial economy and social forces to enable a just transition

Protests against the general neoliberal politics

While the climate justice movement is a growing wide spread protest in every corner of the world building momentum in small and large scale it has its limitations. What is also needed is challenging the system at the general political level. That is what is going on in some countries at the moment while in many others the situation is passive. While the climate justice movement and the general concern about global warming is spreading rather steadily all over the world the mass protests against the neoliberal general politics and the strongly connected wars and occupations to control the supply of natural resources are more volatile.

In general at least in Europe antineoliberal mass movements are on the defensive and especially trade unions are under pressure if they do not accept worsening working conditions. In elections right wing parties are the dominant force on the whole continent. When mass protests occur as in Greece two years ago the result can be worsening of the situation and even more neoliberal policies put in place to save the foreign banks and make the people pay.

The solutions accepted at the national level by some popular movements causes serious problems in other countries. The German trade unions accepted wage dumping in exchange for maintaining jobs. In other countries workers were able to maintain their salaries in par with the increase of productive instead as in Germany were the productivity increase worked in favor of the owners of the companies and growing export. If every trade union had chosen to follow suit the result would have been an even deeper crisis. But finally drastic contradictions in the European neoliberal politics reached Eastern, Southern and North Western European periphery as well as North Africa and many other places. The role of the periphery is clear, to feed the banks in the richest countries and owners of capital living on speculation while living with rising food prices and social cuts as a result often of demands by IMF. This has been a problem in many parts of the world for long but have now reached also Europe. The renewed axis between Germany and France to promote even more austerity politics with the help of EU will only deepen the contradictions and crisis.

But when the neoliberal authoritarian regimes following the demands by IMF and supported by EU and the US in North Africa started to fall down like in Tunisia and Egypt and now on the way in other countries this model meet severe resistance by movements that had started to protest against their politics already in the 1970s. These uprising are now often supported from the right to the left, with some similar claims and some different, all too limited from an environmental and climate justice movement perspective.

The common statement by the right and left is that this is a struggle for democracy in the Arab region against authoritarian regimes or dictatorships. This is misleading from an antineoliberal environmental point of view. From this point of view politics, ecology and economy are indivisible. Struggle for democracy is thus necessarily linked to the ecological and economical side of the protests. It is quite clear that the neoliberal model is directly in contradiction with the food sovereignty politics demanded by Via Campesina, Friends of the Earth groups and many others. With the total industrialization of agriculture which neoliberalism aims for with the exception of a small niche production of ecological food for those wealthy enough to afford it. The sky rocketing food prices which is the result of a volatile speculation economy combined with the destruction of domestic peasants by subsidized food from rich countries agriculture industry is a devastating combination together with the general assault against working people like the textile female workers in Egypt which with their strikes is a main factor behind the uprising.

Thus the linkage between an ever growing capitalistic speculation economy and a development model based on ever growing consumption of natural resources including destruction of ecological friendly ways of domestic production of food is at the core of the conflict behind the uprisings. A politics promoted by neoliberal regimes in rich countries unto the rest of the world in alliance with authoritarian segments in oppressed countries. In the case of the Arab world this is further emphasized by the role given to the region of the rich countries with their fossil fuel based economies as a region controlled by smaller privileged nations with less population that are supported by the rich countries to see to that the countries with larger populations are kept under control by their oppressive leaders and massive intervention from the West, at times with brutal force as the help to Iraq to make war with Iran and the later war against Iraq.

From an environmental point of view the struggle in the Arabic world is thus intimitely linked to the struggle against a development model devastating nature and built on aggressive control of fossil fuel sources which for certain is not a struggle which can be limited to the Arab world but is a common task. To the environmental movement in Sweden have since decades stated that the primary solidarity struggle is to change production and consumption patterns in Sweden so that it is not based on overuse of natural resources from other countries. As long as this development model claiming that people in rich countries are entitled to use more than their fair share of the natural resources on earth is in place it is causing the support by so called democratic countries as EU member states to oppressive regimes in the whole world.

The right and the left have some differing point of views on the uprisings in the Arabic and African world now spreading to the mass protests in Wisconsin in the US. The right delinks politics from economy which is helpful for avoiding the connection to the ecological and social justice problems which are a part of the economy promoted by the rich and proclaimed democratic nations. To the right winger whether liberal or conservative democracy is a question of form and have nothing to do with content. The geographic limitations is also self evident to them and thus there is no decisive connection between formally democratic countries in the West and the oppressive authoritarian regimes in countries with a central role in seeing to that rich and formally democratic nations is secured cheap natural resources. Under all circumstances there is no reason to reevaluate the own politics at home due to the uprisings in the Arab world.

To the left winger in rich European countries the dominant view seems to be that of revolutionary romanticism, general US criticism and delinking the struggle in the Arabic world from the struggle in their own countries. Appeals are made for mass protests in Palestine against the Israeli occupation in this leftist version of constant exotism appealing to revolutions sometimes in the future or in other countries rather than to reevaluate the struggle at home and also under other conditions than utter desperation like after 60 years of occupation supported by the rich countries.

US as a main enemy of the left is also a way to avoid focusing on politics were one can make a difference at home. In Sweden the left has mass produced articles about how bad the US is with their war and occupation of Iraq. There are hundreds of left wing articles in Sweden strongly criticizing the US for making false claims on the existence of weapons of mass destruction to start the war against Iraq causing the death of hundreds of thousand people. I have seen not one article about the responsibility of Sweden causing the death as many or more people in Iraq as we and others were supporting the economic sanctions against Iraq with devastating effects on the population built on exactly the same false accusations as those used by the US to start the war. The weapons of mass destruction did not disappear suddenly the day the US invaded, they had long gone before in a time when economic sanctions caused the death of hundreds of thousands. The left seems sometimes to have become part of an international literature market were it is more important to appoint big names as enemies than to do the home work in the municipality or country you live in instead of putting all your energy into criticizing other countries or calling for Palestinians to do one more dangerous intifada. From an environmental point of view EU and its member states is as much of a problem as the US and have supported ”stability” in the Arab region and Africa in similar and devastating ways.

The struggle to change production and consumption patterns and politics at local and national level including foreign policy is of course at times not as spectacular as large uprisings in other parts of the world or omnipotent ideas about shifting EU to become a progressive political force. But it is here we need to see what we can do and how the challenges in the world model for an economy based on cheap natural resources as fossil fuel by the uprisings in the Arab or other regions also means something for the daily struggle in every corner of the world also when it is not spectacular. By simultaneous struggles at all levels combining daily struggles and organizing solidarity across borders when necessary also in less spectacular cases is an internationalistic way forward. But this seems to be outside the view of many left wing commentators. They seem to draw the same conclusion of the uprisings in many aspects as the right – Under all circumstances there is no reason to reevaluate the own politics at home due to the uprisings in the Arab world.

The successful uprising in Western Europe

This becomes clear when seeing what both the left and right excludes from their analysis but the environmental movement have to include and all other opposing the present world order. That of successful uprising against neoliberal politics in a rich European democratic country were the government had no choice but to step down or call in the military from an EU member state to survive against the confrontative demands by the people. What is going on in Tunisia and Egypt have already been successfully accomplished in a Western European country. Thus the claim that what is going on is uprisings in the Arab world is wrong, the uprisings are also going on in other parts of the world with similar form and content including the best and richest of formally democratic nations. Why the right commentators excludes this fact from their analysis is after all understandable although makes their intellectual position utterly weak. After all it was 20 years of right-centre neoliberal government that was thrown out of power with a large scale popular uprising. Why the left also is excluding this Western European country in the same way is a fact at first thought puzzling, at second thought possible to understand as the example point at the necessity of change of the form and content of left wing politics in Western Europe.

The successful uprising started in the autumn of 2008 and reached a climax in January 2009 when people after demonstrations every week broke all restrictions of the police and forced their way through the police lines and smashed more or less all the windows of the parliament making it very clear that the government had no whatsoever control of the country any longer and had to go. The actions were disciplined and no harm was made to policeman but there was no way to not understand the message, you have to go as you have no power anymore. The police force was to small to control the growing protests. For the first time since 1949 the police used tear gas but it did not help. The only choice left was to call in the military from the EU member state Denmark who were staying on ships in the outer harbour of Reykjavik. But to call in the former colonial power that gave the freedom to Iceland as late as 1944 was not a popular option so the right-centre government resigned and new elections were held which brough a left-centre government to power.

Both the form, the content and the result of this successful uprising in Iceland brings in question the left in the rest of Western Europe. One is that the uprising was disciplined and all the different strands with the anarchists and environmentalists as those most radically questioning the present development model in Iceland both in content and in the way protests were organized as well as more moderate political forces all keeping to a strict code of not using violence against people. This in contrast to the unclear notion of diversity of tactics which is splitting the movements into factions in some countries. Thus when repression hit the Icelandic movement there is a lot stronger solidarity then in other Western countries were solidarity sometimes is lacking almost totally. This becomes clear before and during the trial against the Reykjavik 9, protesters standing trial in January 2011 for a peaceful action inside the parliament in 2008. In Iceland all the main stream press have declared them guilty of violence for months and stated that what they have done have no precedence in Iceland and thus many years in prison is reasonable. The foreign minister declared the opposite in the court room. In other countries like Sweden even the most self proclaimed revolutionary left wing party either joins the police opinion and declares the activists as more or less terrorist in need of policing or gets totally paralysed due to the media accusations of violence and starts to fight each other instead of the repression.

The political result of the uprising is also a fact showing that what more or less all the left with some parliamentary power is doing in Western Europe is wrong. The Icelandic people did not only make one uprising, they made two, both successful. With the new left-centre government in place Iceland started to negotiate to come out of the economic collapse that the former government had put the country into. They tried to make a deal with several foreign countries and institutions as IMF. The people did not accept the deal and started protesting again and thus the government found a clever way out. A referendum were a clear majority rejected the deal. Now the government could go into negotiations again making a better deal than before.

What Iceland did was directly contrary to the solutions forced onto countries like Greece and Ireland. Iceland placed its biggest lenders in receivership. It chose not to protect all creditors of the country’s banks. “Iceland did the right thing by making sure its payment systems continued to function while creditors, not the taxpayers, shouldered the losses of banks,” stated Joseph Stiglitz to Bloomberg.

The successful politics in Iceland after the uprisings are seen as good also by main stream economists. So why do we not hear about this solution o the crisis? The reason might be simple. The parliamentarian left is so occupied by being respected as responsible and accepts the core of the solutions in saving the banks instead of challenging the whole model by stating Iceland as an example and pointing at the economic catastroph in for Greece and Ireland when domestic debts possible to reduce by domestic decisions are turned into international debts making the EU the powerful collector for the foreign banks. What EU does is the opposite to Iceland, to force countries and thus their tax payers to make the creditors of the banks completely irresponsible and fully paid for their speculation without risk. To stand up against this way of saving the banks by letting people pay is not what many or any left wing parliamentary parties do by pointing at the Icelandic alternative. Instead general ideological rhetoric stating we do not pay for their crisis becomes a way for these parties to avoid using the parliament as a platform to build political opposition.

What they are doing instead, at least in Sweden, is playing political theatre. This became obvious in the last election when the left party formed an alliance with the Greens and social democrats. To very many in the left party it was obvious that the political platform of this Red Green alliance had no substantial difference from that of the right wing alliance which has now for the first time since 1932 been able to govern the country for a second term. One radical left winger in the party concluded that if the left party should have formulated a stronger political platform which he sees is needed and stayed outside of the alliance between the Greens and the Social democrats the party would have been totally ignored by media and would not have been able to come into the parliament. Thus was the support from the left party of the Red Green alliance necessary.

So at least some Left parties also with a long record of being system critical and still having substantial knowledge of what political opposition is necessary are not independent political actors anymore but extensions of the mass media playing a role in their political theater. To such political parties Iceland is a threat to their image as radical and it is better to exclude this example from people’s memory and continue using anticapitalist rhetoric while not opposing the core of today’s politics in parliament.

The non-parliamentary left have equal strong reasons for excluding Iceland from their understanding of the present situation. If they see parliamentary politics only as a problem and their own role as being non-parliamentarian is it not useful to claim that the Icelandic parliamentary politics and its solution to the crisis is of interest for the rest of Europe. If it furthermore includes member of the governments that defends anarchists the identity politics of much of the non-parliament falls into pieces. Such central politicians cannot have a progressive role when the main stream press is totally against the anarchists claiming that they are violent so Iceland cannot exist. It is too much a threat to identity politics of both the parliamentary and non-parliamentary left.

Iceland is not only a threat to the identity politics of the left at the tactical level but also on the strategic. The strongest supporter of the 9 accused Reykjavik activists comes from the environmental movement Saving Iceland. And if there is a left wing strand among the accused activists it seems to be anarchistic while traditional radical left wing organizations are not a visible actor anymore, at least not presented well abroad. Furthermore it is claimed in the support brochure for the Reykjavik 9 that : ”In interviews and other coverage of the court case, the Reykjavík Nine have shown that their participation in that winter’s uprising was rooted in their opposition towards the whole system – not only the economic collapse and “the crisis”.” With other words the activists are not belonging to a single issue movement or ad hoc group but a system critical movement with more long term goals than replacing one government with another to make some shifts in the costs for the bankruptcy of the banks for the Icelandic people. This threat is fully understood by the neoliberal press who have called for hard sentences against the Reykjavik 9 and claimed that they not only were violent, but also introduced a culture of violence into Icelandic protests. Thus they are also guilty of the escalating protests that continued during the winter and finally forced the government to resign.

In Many Western European countries the non-parliamentarian left is still to quite some extent influenced by parties claiming they are revolutionary and their press. To this left Iceland is a threat showing how a new radical system critical movement is emerging, so better keep silent about Iceland. One good exception is the German MP who have actively engaged in the case. He also makes a connection between the case of the Reykjavik 9 and the recently discovered British spy that was sent into the Saving Iceland movement as well as direct action movement in many other countries and asks if this is part of a European–wide policing of movements.

The case is similar for the environmental movement. In Iceland it is the system critical direct action movement that is strong and not so much environmental NGOs which is the opposite to most other countries in Western Europe. Neither the strong solidarity between the environmental movement and the protesters against the neo-liberal regime or civil disobedience as a form of action are not what many environmental NGOs sees as important.

In spite of that the Icelandic experience is relevant for a number of political reasons it is thus largely ignored both among the left and the environmentalists.

Connecting the hot political spots and the weak

The case of Iceland becomes also interesting when seeing if there is a possibility of connecting struggles in hot spots with successful uprisings and the more daily struggle and even defensive struggle when things gradually gets worse.

Here the climate justice connection can serve as helpful. The climate struggle is going on almost everywhere helped by the fact that any emission or deforestation anywhere on earth are contributing to global warming making our destiny as a human race ultimately connected.

Thus we here can see both an issue and a struggle different in the form in terms of a more steady increase forward and less volatile as the struggle against the economic crisis.

What are than the connections? One is the political content. In both cases is antineoliberal politics at the core of protests. In the case of the climate justice movement the stand against carbon trading, in the case of Iceland a general protests against neoliberal politics. There is furthermore some deeper connection. One is that the banks that brought Iceland to de facto bankruptcy earlier were state owned and then privatized, a privatization with some consequences. One other that the Icelandic crisis have a root in exactly the same idea which is underlying carbon trading schemes, that of establishing a market mechanism for selling nature. A speculation boom like the one promoted by the privatized Icelandic banks has to built on some cash flow and this was created by the decision to allow the selling of fish quota in Iceland.

This points at two complementary ways of challenging the neoliberal hegemony by general political uprising in some countries and a world wide challenge against the expansion of a neoliberal regime in one important sector, nature.

The other connection between the hot spot Iceland and more weak struggle in many other places is the form. Here Iceland has set an example that will tear up some of the hardest resistance against challenging the neoliberal world order, the resistance among many organizations claiming themselves to be anti-neoliberal or even revolutionary.

This resistance was clearly evident during the climate summit in Copenhagen when Denmark was a host to a meeting of global importance. Every revolutionary and other left wing parties in Denmark as well as every other environmental or social organization built on membership and representative democracy chosed to claim that non-violent civil disobedience towards an assembly of legislators which is a central character of a UN conference is an impossibility in Denmark. It would automatically result in violence to be blamed on those initiating the non-violent action and was thus unacceptable in a Nordic political culture like the Danish.

This is correct in the sense that a majority of the Danish people according to opinion polls claims that the violence used by the police against non-violent demonstrators is not actually violence committed by the police but violence caused by the non-violent activist. This is totally different from lets say an Egyptian policeman beating demonstrators with his stick in Cairo to protect the stability of the state who according to the same world view now is committing violence which everyone can see as easily as she or he can see how the policeman using his stick at the Climate Summit conference building is actually not using violence as the violence is caused by the demonstrator who does not understand the self evident need of the stability if the Danish state.

It is also correct in the sense that main stream media and the large majority of the parliamentary parties in Denmark have the same view. The media uses a model for shifting chronology or placing people in false places to make believe the story about police behaving properly and those under violent attack from the police as the cause of violence.

Thus if the only stone thrown at a policeman at the Climate Summit that actually harmed a policeman causing only light injury was thrown as an reaction in another part of the city after that the police mass arrested 918 innocent demonstrators this is by the media presented as preceeding the violence of the police against the demonstrators.

Similar is the way the mass arrested demonstrators are presented as causing their own mass arrest as some few demonstrators were smashing a dozen windows at the stock exchange and foreign ministry. But this was in another section of the demonstration where the police had guided activists into the demonstration that intended to go elsewhere but the police wanted them in the demonstration. It was also in another part of the city far away from the mass arrests. By claiming that there is a connection between the section that was mass arrested and the material damage at the stock exchange and the foreign ministry media presents a model for how the violence against the demonstrators is caused by themselves.

All parliamentary parties from the most radical left to the right with the exception of the social liberal party in the center followed the same pattern in their firsts comments on what had happened. Emberessment was not directed against the totally unacceptable mass arrest of 918 demonstrators who all later in court have been found the right to receive damages as innocent and victims of police abuse. The emberessment was instead directed against stones thrown at the police fueling furthermore the false chronology and misplacing of the mass arrested section in relation to the course of events.

With other words we have a people, mass media and parliamentary parties supporting the police view that the violence used by the police is not violence but actions by non-violent demonstrators and activists is the cause of the violence for everyone to see. Such a country is not at all a police state but a police nation, a situation probably similar to that in many other countries and of importance to deal with if a simultaneous protest movement against the present social and ecological crisis should be able to emerge in more than a few countries under extraordinary circumstances.

In such a police nation it is understandable that representative democratic organizations claim that non-violent action against a UN-conference will be perceived as guilty of the violence that automatically will take place according to this logic. But it is not acceptable. Every organization have their own responsibility towards their stated goal. If the rest of the nation have turned into a police nation this is no excuse for any organization to join the band wagon and even make a principle about it. To claim that only temporary activist networks should carry the whole burden against the violence of the police nation or even see to that when this violence occurs the victims should receive no solidarity is not standing up for the truth which is the basis of our society.

The claim by all formal Danish organizations rejecting to support a non-violent direct action was that the political culture in Denmark was such that by action, non-violent or not, against an assembly of legislators would be regarded as completley unacceptable by everyone except for an isolated small group. This was wrong as such a non-violent action took place at the EU-summit in the same conference center as COP15 was held but this fact was hidden to international cooperation partners or forgotten. More important is that Denmark cannot claim that their political culture is significantly different from that of Iceland sharing history for almost a thousand year and with stable democratic institutions.

As the Icelandic people have been able to make an uprising and storming the parliament successfully in a non-violent manner, this form of action cannot in principle be said to be impossible in Denmark. Furthermore can the Icelandic popular movement show results in combating neoliberal economic politics that most or all the left wing and environmental organisations in Denmark also would like to achieve.

The key point therefore is a question that concerns any European antineoliberal organization, is the kind of non-violent action against a parliament in principle always unacceptable this also means to say not to both the political antineoliberal success and form of the protests in Iceland. As Via Campesina and others in Copenhagen showed was it possible also at a Climate Summit to do the same thing as the Icelandic popular movement did, although it had less success due to that Danish left wing and environmental organizations opposed the non-violent action. It is well argued to claim that Iceland has similar political culture as Denmark. The conclusion of this is that the left-wing and environmental organizations in Denmark are not anti neoliberal or interested to protect the environmental but prefers to be part of a police nation and protect the state when given a choice.

It is necessary in every country were these kind of organizations dominate the political space for opposition to demand clear principles that shows respect for the Icelandic people. There are always specific conditions in each circumstances but there are also a general level were similarities exists. Iceland is a long term democratic nation and their experience should be reflected in any antineoliberal organization in a Western democracy. It gives possibilities of strengthening simultaneous struggles in different countries which also are of importance at Summits when global popular movements can combine their efforts with local mobilization to challenge the present world order.

Linking climate justice to anti neoliberal general political uprisings

Many left wing and environmental organizations are today not only part of the police nation but also accepting the limitations set by mass media. They see the unity with organizations having access to media as more important than to build on clear demands against false solutions on the climate issue. In spite of that key global democratic movements as Jubilee South, Via Campesina, Friends of the Earth International and the whole Climate Justice Now network is opposing carbon trading and offsetting most organisations prefer signing such statement and go home afterwards not taking them seriously.

If it is not media attention there are other tactical reasons for not taking international declarations seriously. One is the interest in cooperating with social partnership trade unions who refuse to take an antineoliberal stand in the climate justice issue. This is why the global day of action has such a out of date watered down platform.

But the antineoliberal climate justice movement is sufficiently large today to enable a stronger uniting initiative leaving the old claim for more action and a real climate deal behind. This was attempted at the Cochabamba gathering but with some problems. One was the exclusion of the Roundtable 18 (mesa 18) which also critically addressed social changes within countries including Bolivia. Another was the rather big ideas about a global referendum but no idea on the immediate term for uniting the climate justice movement.

But this is crucial for the ability to strengthen both the climate justice struggle and the general antineoliberal uprisings and struggles. By using the capacity of the climate justice movement to be present in almost every country a real important force would be added to the general antineoliberal uprising at national level. This would also work well in reverse. By politically showing more closeness to the political energy coming from the uprisings against authoritarian regimes whether in the West or other parts of the world the climate justice struggle would also be strengthened.

The climate justice movement could also learn from the Icelandic experience concerning solidarity. In spite of that all the press was in the hands of neoliberal perspectives and nine activists put to trials were presented as violent while making an action inside the parliament the movement kept together. 705 people claimed they had done the same crime which according to the attorney should result in minimum one year in prison. The trial ended with the verdict not guilty for most of the activist, a fine for two and suspended sentence for two others. The nine activists refuses to accept the verdict claiming that only full aquittal is acceptable.

After COP15 the trials are not yet over and two spokes persons for the non-violent action have been sentenced to four months in prison, verdicts that are up in court once more in the end of May. The massive solidarity in Iceland have lacked in Denamrk, especially during COP15 but also compared to Iceland afterwards. Without solidarity, the movement dies.

The anti-neoliberal uprisings can learn from the climate justice movement work for a constructive program for both agriculture forestry, industry, rural and urban planning to solve the climate crisis in ways which also solves other social and environmental crisis. Inspiration can come from the Klimaforum09, Assembly of Social Movements at European Social Forum in Istanbul and the Cochabamba roundtable 18 declarations that focus much on social justice and constructive solutions. A popular movement cannot only be against if it shall be able to win in the long term, it also needs something to long for, something that can attract more sympatizers and bring about change.

During a long period since 1980 all the results of the productivity increase have fallen into the hands of owners of capital. This has enabled those in power to penetrate every mind and every movement with the message that the market can solve everything while others cling to the defensive hope for the state or EU to challenge the market. The uprisings in Iceland, Africa and Western Asia challenges this model for controlling societies and limiting protest to defensive demands. The key way to try to limit the effect of the uprising in Africa and Western Asia is to claim that this is only a rebellion against dictatorships limited to the Arab world. Here Iceland is an example showing clearly that this is false. Together with the uprising in Wisconsin in the US inspired by the revolt in Egypt we here have examples showing that it is all authoritarian neoliberal and corrupt economic regimes that are challenged.

Together with a global action against neoliberal solutions to the climate crisis combined with a program for just transition the uprisings and the climate justice movement can make 2011 into a springtime of the people. A year of simultaneous struggle in many countries building a solidarity across borders that can bring us a decisive step towards making another world possible.

Tord Björk is active in Friends of the Earth Sweden.

Background on the COP15 lack of solidarity and trials:

The whole world on trial http://www.aktivism.info/socialforumjourney/?p=1109

Final count down for political theater at COP15 trials

http://www.aktivism.info/socialforumjourney/?p=1846

Danish law 1243: Truth! 2010: Power? http://www.aktivism.info/socialforumjourney/?p=1800

Historic COP15 victory against summit repression http://www.aktivism.info/socialforumjourney/?p=1892

Call for solidarity actions with the accused spokespersons for the Climate Justice movement and update information: http://www.climatecollective.org/en/start/

Strategy appeal made at World Social Forum tematico in Mexico May 2010:

Climate Justice and Class Struggles after Cochabamba http://www.aktivism.info/socialforumjourney/?p=1629

Reykjavik 9 and Iceland material:

Facebook cause Support the 9 Reykjavik and COP15 Activists! http://www.causes.com/causes/567523

Background material on the Icelandic situation: http://www.savingiceland.org/tag/rvk9

Solidarity web site for Reykjavik 9: http://www.rvk9.org/in-english/

Iceland’s Decision To Let Banks Fail Gaining Appeal by Paul Nikolov http://grapevine.is/Author/Paul-Nikolov

Report from Bloombergs with quotes from Stiglitz on Icelandic example: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-01/iceland-proves-ireland-did-wrong-things-saving-banks-instead-of-taxpayer.html.

It states that:

– Environmental impacts of the project are high and cannot be mitigated.
– 17,000 ha of untouched wilderness will be affected
– Greenhouse gas emissions of the project would constitute 14% of Iceland’s total.
– There is a high amount of uncertainty regarding the full impact of the planned geothermal power plants and particularly their impact of the geothermal energy resource base.
– The assessed energy projects are not sufficient to power the smelter, with 140 MW of capacity missing.

“These reports confirms three key elements of critique that Saving Iceland voiced now several years ago,” says Jaap Krater, a spokesperson for Saving Iceland.

“The first is that the environmental impact of the drilling in the north would be much greater than Alcoa claimed.”

“Secondly, when the joint impact assessment was announced we insisted that possible dams in Skjalfandafljot, Jökulsá Eystri, Jökulsá Vestri (both in the Skagafjörður region) and Jökulsá á Fjöllum should be assessed for environmental impact. Now our calculations that the northern geothermal fields will not produce enough energy for the smelter are proving correct.”

“Thirdly, we have said that carbon emissions from the projects would be extremely high and would make it very difficult for Iceland to meet its international obligations. This is also confirmed,” explains Krater.

“If Iceland wishes to become an EU member, then this impact assessment will surely be the kiss of death for the Alcoa Bakki project.

Saving Iceland’s energy calculations were reported in Morgunblaðið in August 2008 (1), while the greenhouse gas issues were published in a recent international book publication (2).

References

(1) Bakki Impact Assessment Should Include Dams, by Jaap Krater, Morgunbladid, August 22nd 2008, in Icelandic here and English here.

(2) Development of Iceland’s geothermal energy potential for aluminium production – a critical analysis, by Jaap Krater and Miriam Rose, In: Abrahamsky, K. (ed.) (2010) Sparking a World-wide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World. AK Press, Edinburgh. p. 319-333. Also published on Saving Iceland’s website here.

Big dams have a serious record of social and environmental destruction, and there are many alternatives. So why are they still being built?

On a hot May day, a peasant farmer named Bounsouk looks out across the vast expanse of water before him, the 450-square-kilometer reservoir behind the new Nam Theun 2 dam in Laos. At the bottom of the reservoir is the land where he once lived, grew rice, grazed buffalo, and collected forest fruits, berries, and medicinal plants and spices. Now there is just water, water everywhere.

“Before the flood I could grow enough rice to feed my family and I had 10 buffalo,” he says. “I like our new houses and I like having electricity in the new village, but we do not have enough land and the soil quality is very poor. Now I can’t grow enough rice to feed my family, and three of my buffalo died because they didn’t have enough food.”

Bounsouk is one of 6,200 indigenous people whose lands were flooded to make way for the Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project in this small Southeast Asian country. His story is one that is heard over and over again in the project resettlement area. People are generally happy with their new houses, electricity, and proximity to the road, but are concerned about how they will feed their families in the long term. The poor quality of land and lack of viable income-generating options in this remote area make their prospects bleak.

Big dams have frequently imposed high social and environmental costs and longterm economic tradeoffs, such as lost fisheries and tourism potential and flooded agricultural and forest land. According to the independent World Commission on Dams, most projects have failed to compensate affected people for their losses and adequately mitigate environmental impacts. Local people have rarely had a meaningful say in whether or how a dam is implemented, or received their fair share of project benefits.

But Electricité de France, Nam Theun 2’s developer, together with the Lao government, the World Bank, and other backers, promised that Nam Theun 2 would be different. They called it a “poverty-reduction project.” The company committed to restoring the incomes of affected communities, and the World Bank claimed that the cash-strapped Lao government would use the revenues from Nam Theun 2’s electricity exports to neighboring Thailand solely to benefit the poor. These promises helped seal the deal, bringing in European development agencies, banks, and export credit agencies with hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, loans, and insurance for the US$1.45 billion project, the largest foreign investment ever in Laos.

But while Nam Theun 2’s engineering deadlines have been met, social and environmental programs have stumbled ever since construction started, making life more difficult for Lao villagers. Legal agreements have been violated and social and environmental commitments have been broken. In a manner typical of hydro projects worldwide, promises were made prior to project approval that were later broken by project developers and governments.

Downstream, more than 120,000 people are waiting to see how their lives will be affected when the project starts operation in early 2010. They are likely to suffer the project’s most serious damage, including destruction of fisheries, flooding of riverbank gardens, and water quality problems. Yet the programs to restore livelihoods in this area are badly under-funded and poorly planned.

Rather than being a new model of hydropower development, the experience with Nam Theun 2 to date only reinforces lessons learned from other large hydropower projects around the world. Instead of giving hope for the future, Nam Theun 2 threatens more of the same: broken promises, shattered lives, ruined ecosystems.

Hydro Boom

The dam building industry is greenwashing hydropower with a public relations offensive designed to convince the world that the next generation of dams will provide additional sources of clean energy and help to ease the effects of climate change. In some of the world’s last great free-flowing-river basins, such as the Amazon, the Mekong, the Congo, and the rivers of Patagonia, governments and industry are pushing forward with cascades of massive dams, all under the guise of clean energy.

Following a decade-long lull, a major resurgence in dam construction worldwide is now under way, driven by infusions of new capital from China, Brazil, Thailand, India, and other middle-income countries. In particular, Chinese financial institutions have replaced the World Bank as the largest funder of dam projects globally. Chinese banks and companies are involved in constructing some 216 large dams (“large” means at least 15 meters high, or between 5 and 15 meters and with a reservoir capacity of at least 3 million cubic meters) in 49 different countries, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia, many with poor human rights records. A look at the heavy dam-building activity in China, the Amazon basin, and Africa illustrates the risks involved.

China. China is already home to more than 25,000 large dams, about half of the global total. These projects have forced more than 23 million people from their homes and land, and many are still suffering the impacts of displacement and dislocation. Around 30 percent of China’s rivers are severely polluted with sewage, agricultural and mining runoff, and industrial chemicals, and the flows of some (such as the Yellow River) have been so dramatically altered that they no longer reach the sea. Free-flowing rivers with adequate oxygen and natural nutrient balances can remove or reduce the toxicity of river contaminants, but dams compound pollution problems by reducing rivers’ ability to flush out pollutants and because the reservoirs accumulate upstream contaminants and submerge vegetation, which then rots. The water then released can be highly toxic and can have significant ecological and human-health effects downstream.

Despite the poor record of dam construction in China, the Chinese government has ambitious plans to expand hydropower generation, more than doubling capacity to 250,000 megawatts by 2020. Huge hydropower cascades have been proposed and are being constructed in some of China’s most pristine and diverse river basins in the country’s remote southwest.

The Three Gorges Dam, perhaps the world’s most notorious dam, generates electricity equivalent to that of about 25 coal-fired power stations. Yet the tradeoffs involved are enor-

mous. The project has been plagued by corruption, spiraling costs, environmental catastrophes, human rights violations, and resettlement difficulties. To date, more than 1.3 million people have been moved to make way for the dam. Hundreds of thousands of these people have received tiny, barren plots of land or have been sent to urban slums with limited cash compensation and housing. Those resettled in towns around the edge of the Three Gorges reservoir have seen the shore of the reservoir collapse in as many as 91 places, killing scores of people and forcing whole villages to relocate. Protests have been met with repression, including imprisonment and beatings.

The Three Gorges Dam is, unfortunately, the tip of the iceberg. In southwest China, at least 114 dams on eight rivers in the region are being proposed or are under development on major rivers, such as the Lancang (Upper Mekong), the Nu (Upper Salween), and the Jinsha (Upper Yangtze). Many of these projects are among the largest in the world, with correspondingly serious impacts on river ecology, displacement of hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority people, and concerns about the safety of downstream communities. Several of the projects are in or adjacent to the Three Parallel Rivers World Heritage Site, threatening the ecological integrity of one of the most spectacular and biologically rich areas of the world.

Of increasing concern is the potential for dams in Southwest China to trigger earthquakes. Recent evidence has emerged that the devastating 7.9-magnitude Sichuan earthquake of May 2008, which killed an estimated 90,000 people, may have been caused by the Zipingpu Dam. It is well established that large dams can trigger earthquakes through what is called reservoir-induced seismicity. Scientists believe that there are more than 100 instances of reservoirs causing earthquakes around the world. According to geophysical hazards researcher Christian Klose of Columbia University, “The several hundred million tons of water piled behind the Zipingpu Dam put just the wrong stresses on the adjacent Beichuan fault.”

Many of China’s dam projects are being built on international rivers with no evaluation of the potential transboundary impacts. The cascade of eight dams being built on the Lancang River will drastically change the Mekong River’s natural flood/drought cycle and block the transport of sediment, affecting ecosystems and the livelihoods of millions living downstream in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Fluctuations in water levels and reduced fisheries caused by the three dams already completed have been recorded along the Thai-Lao border. Despite this, construction has proceeded without consultation with China’s downstream neighbors and without an assessment of the dams’ likely impacts on the river and its people.

Meanwhile, downstream along the Mekong, the governments of Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia are planning their own cascade of 11 dams on the river’s mainstream, and scores of additional dams on its tributaries. The projects are being proposed by Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian, and Thai developers, with financing presumably from public and private financial institutions in their home countries. The growth of regional capital has fueled the resurgence of these projects, which have been on the drawing board for decades.

Around 60 million people depend on the Mekong River for fish, irrigation, transportation, and water. Known regionally as the “Mother of Waters,” the Mekong supports one of the world’s most diverse fisheries, second only to the Amazon. Those fisheries are a major source of protein for people living in the Mekong basin, and the annual fisheries harvest has a first-sale value of about $2 billion. If built, the dams would severely damage the river’s ecology and block the major fish migrations that ensure regional food security and provide income to millions of people.

The Amazon.  Under the guise of promoting cheap, clean energy, Brazil’s dam builders are planning more than 100 dams in the Amazon. Already two big dams are under construction on the Amazon’s principal tributary, the Madeira, with several others in the licensing process. Brazil’s electricity-sector bureaucrats say these will be kinder, gentler dams with smaller reservoirs, designed to lessen social and environmental impacts. Legislation has been introduced that would fast-track the licensing of new dams in Amazonia and allow projects to circumvent Brazil’s tough environmental laws, under the pretext that they are of “strategic importance” to Brazil’s future.

By flooding large areas of rainforest, opening up new areas to logging, and changing the flow of water, the scores of dams being planned threaten to disturb the fragile water balance of the Amazon and increase the drying of the forest, a process that is already occurring due to climate change and extensive deforestation. New research confirms the critical role the Amazon plays in regulating the climate not only of South America, but also of parts of North America. The transformation of extensive areas of the Amazon into drier savannas would cause havoc with regional weather patterns. Lower precipitation, in turn, would render many of the dams obsolete.

Meanwhile, mocking one of the dams’ justifications, the greenhouse gas emissions could be enormous. Amazonian dams are some of the dirtiest on the planet; the Balbina Dam alone emits 10 times more greenhouse gases (from rotting vegetation in the reservoir) than a coal-fired plant of the same capacity. What’s more, the planned projects would expel more than 100,000 river-bank dwellers from their lands and seriously degrade extensive indigenous lands and protected areas.

The Santo Antonio and Jirau Dams on the Madeira River, currently under construction, have also raised the possibility that individual dams could affect a huge area of the Amazon Basin. Scientists have pointed out that several valuable migratory fish species could suffer near-extinction as a result of the Madeira dams, depleting fisheries and fauna thousands of kilometers up and downstream. The fertility of the Amazon floodplain, important for agriculture and fish reproduction, would also be impaired because a significant portion of the sediments and nutrients carried by the Madeira would be trapped in the reservoirs.

There is no doubt that meeting Brazil’s future energy needs is of crucial importance, but there are alternatives to more dams. A study by WWF-World Wide Fund for Nature showed that Brazil could meet a major part of its future energy needs at lower social, environmental, and economic cost by investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy. Brazil’s enormous windpower potential is attracting investors, and the country’s potential for generating electricity from biomass, such as sugarcane bagasse, rice husks, and sawmill scraps, has been calculated to exceed the capacity of the massive Itaipu Dam.

Africa.  In Africa, dam construction is also on the rise. Africa is the least-electrified place in the world, with just a fraction of its citizens having access to electricity. Solving this huge problem is made more difficult by widespread poverty and poor governance, and because a large majority of the people live far from the grid, which greatly adds to the cost of bringing electricity to them.

The World Bank and many of the continent’s energy planners are pinning their hopes for African electrification on something as ephemeral as the rain, by pushing for a series of large dams across the continent. World Bank energy specialist Reynold Duncan told an energy conference earlier this year that Africa needs to greatly increase its investments in hydropower. “In Zambia, we have the potential of about 6,000 megawatts, in Angola we have 6,000 megawatts, and about 12,000 megawatts in Mozambique,” he said. “We have a lot of megawatts down here before we even go up to the Congo.”

Duncan said that governments and investors should not hesitate to look at riskier assets such as hydropower, adding that only 5 percent of the continent’s hydro potential had been tapped. But “risky” is right. New African dams are being built with no examination of how climate change will affect them, even though many existing dams are already plagued by drought-caused power shortages.

Climate change is expected to dramatically alter the dynamics of many African rivers, worsening both droughts and floods. In this climate, the proposed frenzy of African dam building could be literally disastrous. Unprecedented flooding will cause more dams to collapse and hasten the rate at which their reservoirs fill with sediment. Meanwhile, worsening droughts will mean dams will fail to meet their power production targets.

Dams are not inexpensive investments: Just developing one of these dams, the Mphanda Nkuwa in Mozambique, is expected to cost at least $2 billion (not including the necessary transmission lines). Yet these huge projects are doing little to bridge the electricity divide in Africa. With the majority of the continent’s population living far from existing electricity grids, what is needed is a major decentralized-power rollout of renewables and small power plants to build local economies from the ground up, not the top down. But that’s not where the money is right now.

Corruption

These examples from three areas of heavy dam-building activity hint at the spectrum of major problems they present. Big dams can contribute to development, but that progress often comes at staggering cost, in displaced and impoverished refugees, ecologically fragmented and damaged rivers, and downstream victims of destroyed fisheries and impounded sediments. Big dams also expand the habitat of waterborne disease vectors such as malaria, dengue fever, schistosomiasis, and liver fluke, and can trigger devastating earthquakes by increasing seismic stresses. Dams frequently fail to deliver their projected benefits and usually wind up costing more than predicted. And although hydropower is touted as a solution to climate change, many dams actually emit huge quantities of greenhouse gases. As Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy has put it, “Big dams are to a nation’s development what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction.”

If dams continue to wreak havoc with people’s lives and ecosystems, and are increasingly risky in a warming world, why do they continue to be built and promoted? And why are they now being hailed as a source of green, renewable energy?

One of the main reasons is vested interests: There are substantial profits to be had, for the hydropower industry, their network of consultants, and host-country bureaucracies, from planning, building, and operating massive infrastructure projects. These attractions often trump the impacts on people and ecosystems and the need to develop sustainable economies in the midst of a growing water and food crisis.

Industry consultants and engineering companies that undertake feasibility studies and environmental impact assessments know that they need to portray a project in a favorable light if they want to get future contracts. In case after case, and without comprehensively assessing the alternatives, they consistently claim that the impacts can be mitigated and that the project in question represents the best option for meeting the country’s needs.

Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) that should anticipate problems have served as a rubber-stamping device rather than a real planning tool. Jiang Gaoming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reports that construction on many projects in southwest China is under way in violation of key aspects of Chinese law. Many projects lack an EIA and have not been approved by the government. According to Jiang, even basic safety checks have not been performed and government regulators are uninvolved. “EIAs have become a marginalized and decorative process, seen as just a part of the cost of doing business,” says Jiang. “Both the builders and local government know that, to date, an EIA has never managed to halt a dam project.”

Needless to say, corruption also plays a key role. A dam involves a huge upfront investment of resources, making it easy for government officials and politicians to skim some off the top. One of the most egregious examples of corruption involving a dam project is the Yacyretá Dam on the Paraná River, between Argentina and Paraguay. In the 1980s, the cost of this “monument to corruption” (in the words of former Argentine president Carlos Menem) ballooned from an original estimate of $1.6 billion to more than $8 billion. In 2002 and 2003, several of the biggest dam-building companies in the world were convicted of bribing the former director of the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority to win contracts on Lesotho’s Katse Dam. Masupha Sole accepted around $2 million in bribes from major dam-building firms such as Acres International of Canada and Lahmeyer International of Germany. In China, corrupt local officials stole millions of dollars intended for people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam. At least 349 people have been found guilty of embezzling a total of about 12 percent of the project’s resettlement budget.

The Way Forward

Needless to say, these are not easy problems to address. The most ambitious and systematic attempt to date has been undertaken by the World Commission on Dams (WCD), a multi-stakeholder independent body established by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union (IUCN) in 1998. After a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of large dams, the Commission issued its final report, Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-Making, in 2000.

Briefly, the WCD recommends conducting an open and participatory process to identify the real needs for water and energy services, followed by a careful assessment of all options for meeting those needs, giving social and environmental aspects the same significance as technical, economic, and financial factors. If a new dam is truly needed, outstanding social and environmental issues from existing dams should be addressed, and the benefits from existing projects should be maximized. Public acceptance of all key decisions should be demonstrated and decisions affecting indigenous peoples should be guided by their free, prior, and informed consent. Legally binding agreements should be negotiated with affected people to ensure the implementation of mitigation, resettlement, and development entitlements. Impact assessments should follow European Union and other global EIA standards. By definition, an effective EIA “ensures that environmental consequences of projects are identified and assessed before authorization is given”- something that almost never occurs in today’s world. Dam projects built on international rivers should also evaluate the potential transboundary impacts or cumulative impacts from multi-dam projects in regional watersheds.

The dam industry has rejected the WCD guidelines and in 2007 established its own process, hoping to develop a sustainability protocol that will replace the WCD framework as the most legitimate benchmark for dam projects. But the industry approach is clearly an attempt to circumnavigate the more robust requirements of the WCD while paying lipservice to sustainability.

In fact, the industry’s attempt to repackage hydropower as a green, renewable technology is both misleading and unsupported by the facts, and alternatives are often preferable. In general, the cheapest, cleanest, and fastest solution is to invest in energy efficiency. Up to three-quarters of the electricity used in the United States, for instance, could be saved with efficiency measures that would cost less than the electricity itself. Developing countries, which will account for 80 percent of global energy demand growth up to 2020, could cut that growth by more than half using existing efficiency technologies, according to McKinsey Global Institute. “Technology transfer” programs can be an effective way to help poorer nations avoid having to reinvent the wheel; for example, California’s remarkable energy efficiency program has been sharing knowledge with Chinese energy agencies and government officials to jump-start strong efficiency programs there.

Even with investment in efficiency, however, many developing countries will require new generation sources. Developing countries often have vast, unexploited renewable energy potential, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and modern biomass energy, as well as low-impact, non-dam hydropower. Such technologies are much more suited to meeting the energy needs of the rural poor, as they can be developed where people need the power and do not require the construction of transmission lines. Examples include the installation, supported by Global Environment Facility incentives, of hundreds of thousands of solar home systems in Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka, and Uganda.

Large-scale true renewables can also be an attractive and affordable solution to many countries’ energy problems. The cost of windpower in good locations is now comparable to or lower than that of conventional sources. Both solar photovoltaic and concentrating solar power are rapidly coming down in price. A 2008 report from a U.S. National Academy of Engineering panel predicts that solar power will be cost-competitive with conventional energy sources in five years.

As for systemic corruption, it must be openly challenged by governments, funding agencies, and other proponents of dam projects. Regulations must be written to identify, define, and eliminate corruption at all levels of the planning process. And the regulations must be openly supported and enforced by the World Bank, the dam industry, the hydropower companies, and the governments supporting dam construction. The dam industry itself, together with its biggest government allies, such as China, Brazil and India, must take steps toward internal reform. Adopting the WCD guidelines would be a good first step, together with instituting such practices as integrity pacts, anti-corruption legislation, and performance bonds that require developers to comply with commitments.

A vigorous assault on corruption, plus technology transfer and financial assistance: these are the keys to allowing developing countries to leapfrog to a sustainable, twenty-first-century energy regime. The stakes are high, because healthy rivers, like all intact ecosystems, are priceless. The alternative, quite simply, is a persistent legacy of human and environmental destruction.

Aviva Imhof is the campaigns director for International Rivers, an environmental and human rights organization based in Berkeley, California. Guy R. Lanza is a professor of microbiology and director of the Environmental Science Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The Spectacle

Environmental issues can oftentimes be very complex. Some issues directly relate to climate change, and some do not. However, it is very important to connect the dots between issues because almost all environmental problems are caused, at their base, by capitalist expansion, commodification and privatization. Corporations have used the climate crisis and growing public concern about environmental issues to their advantage. They have learned to use the rhetoric of environmentalism to justify extremely oppressive projects whose sole purpose is to increase their power and to continue the cycle of production and consumption. Incredibly destructive projects, such as hydrofracture natural gas extraction in Upstate New York, are marketed as clean. This absurd spectacle must be stopped.

In Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, he writes, “The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification … The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life … It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.” And now the light of that sun is green. The green spectacle is confronting the climate crisis with hollow solutions presented to us in a pleasant, prefabricated package that can be bought if we can afford them and allow us to pollute in good conscience. In an absurd twist, these corporate false solutions cause the poor, and those who resist these schemes, to be blamed for destroying the planet. “It is not the oil companies who are to blame for climate change, but the poor who do not buy carbon offsets when they travel.” Thus, the climate crisis becomes another way to make money and increase corporate power.

In short, the green spectacle is an image of a greener, more natural society, reached by corporate solutions. The green spectacle is created by the undeniable urgency of our climate crisis and capitalism’s need to reinvent itself and present its own solutions to climate change, because it is clear that any real solution would eliminate capitalism. Sadly, many groups that wish to solve climate change are limited in their ability to combat it because they must live within the spectacle and believe the corporate media’s lies. So even people fighting against the system get caught up in its maze, never attacking the root systemic causes of our issues. We must create our own narrative and attack the roots of this ecocidal system. We cannot let corporations trick us into accepting false solutions.

The Lies: Biofuels, Carbon Trading and Privitization

Biofuels are often said to be a possible solution to the climate crisis. However, they are more likely to make the problem worse than better. Not only does it take more energy to produce biofuels than they contain, but biofuels are an expansion of industrial agriculture, which is a major cause of climate change, deforestation, the dispossession of local communities, bio-diversity loss, water and soil degradation, and loss of food sovereignty and security. Additionally, the production of biofuels takes farmland that could be used to feed people and instead uses it to grow ethanol for our cars. Food riots have already broken out in Mexico, where prices rose on corn because of ethanol production. With over 865 million hungry people in this world, it is puzzling why we would be growing food for hungry cars and not hungry people.

Carbon trading, too, is nothing more than a way for the biggest polluters to look like they are doing something about climate change and make a fortune in the process. Governments arbitrarily give out carbon credits, usually to the biggest polluters, and they are traded as a normal commodity. Two of the largest carbon trading schemes that have already been implemented are REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) and CDM (Clean Development Mechanisms). Their joint implementation is a way of privatizing, selling and profiting more from our natural resources.

REDD takes land rights away from local people and puts them in the hands of corporations. In many cases, non-native trees are planted, such as monoculture eucalyptus trees in Brazil, which changes the ecosystem, drying up the land and hurting the plants that local people use to survive.

CDM allows industrialized countries with a greenhouse gas reduction commitment (such as the Kyoto Protocol) to invest in projects that (in theory) reduce emissions in developing countries, instead of more expensive emission reductions in their own countries. CDM projects, for example, allow companies to privatize rivers to create “clean” hydroelectric dams. Since the dam produces less carbon emissions than a theoretical coal plant that might have been built, the company receives carbon credits, allowing it to pollute more, or sell the credits.

All this privatizing also means more surveillance and displacement. Since the forests now exist for profit, indigenous people who have lived in them for generations are being forced off their land.

One of our most important resources is already being privatized: water. Less than one percent of the world’s freshwater (or 0.007 percent of the world’s water) is accessible and potable. This needs to be shared by the world’s 6.7 billion people, the myriad wildlife and ecosystems, and human agriculture and industries. However, this resource is no longer being treated as a commons. Water is being privatized to create hydroelectric dams that produce “clean energy” for destructive processes such as aluminum smelting. Dams destroy ecosystems by turning them into stagnant cesspools, displace whole communities by forcing them off the land, and release huge amounts of methane from flooded vegetation. Water has even begun to be traded in global stock exchanges. Today, an individual or corporation can invest in water-targeted hedge funds, index funds and exchange traded funds (EFTs), water certificates, shares of water engineering and technology companies, and a host of other newfangled water investments. Privatized water is now a $425 billion industry and is expected to grow to a $1 trillion industry within five years.

Often, the picture painted by mainstream media and water-rights activists is too simple – that of a single corporation (such as Coca-Cola in India or Bechtel in Bolivia) “corporatizing water;” the real story is not just of flamboyant tycoons or individual corporations sucking dry springs and groundwater to the detriment of poor subsistence farmers or slum-dwellers. Water is being privatized by a complex global network of investment banks, private equity firms, public pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and multinational corporations that are buying up and controlling water worldwide. Investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse are aggressively buying up water rights all over the world. As climate change shrinks fresh water resources, there will be even more money to be made in private water.

The Result: Militarism and Xenophobia

The New York Times recently wrote that, according to military and intelligence analysts, “the changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics.” These analysts, experts at the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies, say that such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions. The U.S. military recently launched its “war on global warming,” stating that the “military [will] play a key role in tackling climate change, and are developing military strategies to deal with it.” It’s a whole new frontier in the fight for freedom and justice.

In particular, military experts say that the potential scale of catastrophe could trigger revolution and political upheaval. One report states, “When a government can no longer deliver services to its people, ensure domestic order and protect the nation’s borders from invasion, conditions are ripe for turmoil, extremism and terrorism to fill the vacuum.” The report advocates bolstering U.S. military bases and key allied governments in unstable regions of the world. Other military officials have said that climate change will increase demands for our military to carry out “relief” and “disaster” assistance missions. Disaster relief will become a military occupation.

Unsurprisingly, the United States defends the short-term interests of its ruling elite by seizing natural energy resources through both privatization and war. However, it must rely on the military-industrial complex, which is increasingly privatized and fragmented. As Naomi Klein describes in The Shock Doctrine, disaster capitalism profits greatly from crisis, real or imagined. As the Climate War becomes the dominant organizing principle for the planet, the military-industrial system will seek to profit from both the destruction of war and the rebuilding of damaged systems.

War is big business and a major industry that thrives on crisis. It alone ensures constant crises either by physical force or by political discourses that justify a constant cash flow. The United States and European Union use large numbers of likely climate refugees in their own right-wing propaganda, creating fear against these people, and using that fear as a means to strengthen border security. Since capitalist states have no means of addressing climate change other than making preparations for cracking down on social unrest, Fortress Europe and the United States will strengthen their borders even more, criminalizing and blaming migrants and asylum seekers, saying it is the poor who are truly responsible for climate change.

Every year we see thousands of people flee their countries of origin in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, hoping for a better life. While the majority will move to nearby countries, many will attempt the long and dangerous journey to Europe or the United States. It is impossible to determine exactly how many people are forced to migrate directly because of climate change. What is clear is that the position of wealth and privilege in the Global North is, to a large extent, the result of the exploitation of land, people and resources in two-thirds of the world, the very same processes that have driven industrial capitalism and caused climate change.

The world’s poor did not cause climate change, but they are more vulnerable to its effects because of where and how they live. Whether in agricultural areas or city slums in the Global South, they have fewer options available when things go wrong. Africa and South East Asia, for example, are some of the most geographically vulnerable places on the planet.

Climate change is already being used to give further legitimacy to the concepts of “national preservation” and “homeland security.” For example, Lee Gunn, president of the American Security Project has said, “Here’s how Washington should begin preparing for the consequences associated with climate change: Invest in capabilities within the U.S. government (including the Defense Department) to manage the humanitarian crises – such as a new flow of ‘climate refugees’ – that may accompany climate change and subsequently overwhelm local governments and threaten critical U.S. interests.” Once again, state and capital interests are the top priority, and the wellbeing of people and the environment are not even a consideration. He goes on to say that the United States should “lead the world in developing conflict-resolution mechanisms to mediate between climate change’s winners and losers.” And we all know who the winners will be. India has begun putting these ideas into practice. They are currently building a perimeter fence around their entire border with Bangladesh, a country more at risk than almost any other from the devastating consequences of rising sea levels. The fence has been explicitly talked about as a barrier to migration. If sea levels rise and Bangladeshi people are driven from their homes, they will find themselves trapped inside this cage.

A crucial part of the fight for climate justice is building a radical movement that challenges the use of the threat of climate chaos as an excuse for even more draconian migration controls and national and international security measures.

Conclusion

Capitalism results in the need for continuous war and ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, causing environmental degradation, climate change, social injustice and more war. The solutions to climate change within this system only feed the war machine and strengthen authoritarian regimes of control, while further degrading the rights of indigenous peoples and animals. The powerful have divided and conquered us for too long, and they have many tools to keep us mired in false conflict. But they are all human-made tools. We must build up our hearts, and realize that pacifism does not imply love. Love has emotion, and emotions are not passive and flat-lining. So to topple this system and create horizontal communities, we must fight with this love for ourselves, love for our families, friends and comrades. This is not a passive love – this is an emotional, burning love. True love is radical, and dangerous to this sterile system.

As Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “However desperate the situation and circumstances, do not despair. When there is everything to fear, be unafraid. When surrounded by dangers, fear none of them. When without resources, depend on resourcefulness. When surprised, take the enemy itself by surprise.”

Iceland is developing its hydro and geothermal resources in the context of an energy master plan, mainly to provide power for expansion of the aluminium industry. This paper tests perceptions of geothermal energy as low-carbon, renewable and environmentally benign, using Icelandic geothermal industry as a case study.
The application of geothermal energy for aluminium smelting is discussed as well as environmental and human rights record of the aluminium industry in general. Despite application of renewable energy technologies, emission of greenhouse gases by aluminium production is set to increase.
Our analysis further shows that carbon emissions of geothermal installations can approximate those of gas-powered plants. In intensely exploited reservoirs, life of boreholes is limited and reservoirs need extensive recovery time after exploitation, making geothermal exploitation at these sites not renewable in the short to medium term. Pollution and landscape impacts are extensive when geothermal technology is applied on a large scale.

Krater and Rose – Development of Iceland’s Geothermal Energy – Download as PDF
The full publication will be available from Jan. 15, 2010. ISBN 9781849350051.

Our climate is not their business!

Öskra! – The movement of revolutionary students, presents the COP-15 climate summit in Copenhegen and wants no false solutions based on economical growth at the expence of people and the environment.

From the 7th to 18th of December 2009, the largest ‘climate summit’ ever to be held will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark. This summit has been billed as our ‘last, best hope’ to do something about climate change. But the UN talks will not solve the climate crisis: emissions continue to rise at ever faster rates, while carbon trading allows climate criminals to pollute and profit. It is time to say enough! No more business as usual, no more false solutions!

Change the system, not the climate!
We cannot trust the market with our future, nor put our faith in unsafe, unproven and unsustainable technologies. We know that on a finite planet, it is impossible to have infinite growth – ‘green’ or otherwise. Instead of trying to fix a destructive system, we are advancing alternatives that provide real and just solutions to the climate crisis: leaving fossil fuels in the ground; reasserting peoples’ and community control over resources; relocalising food production; reducing overconsumption, particularly in the North; recognising the ecological and climate debt owed to the peoples of the South and making reparations; and respecting indigenous and forest peoples’ rights. Reclaiming power from below! In Copenhagen, we will come together from many different backgrounds and movements, experiences and struggles. We are indigenous peoples and farmers, workers and environmentalists, feminists and anticapitalists. Now, our diverse struggles for social and ecological justice are finding common ground in the struggle for climate justice, and in our desire to reclaim power over our own future. We the people need to come up with our own agenda an agenda from below, an agenda of climate justice, of real solutions against their false ones. We need to reclaim the power from below.

By Michael Smith and Adriana Brasileiro
Bloomberg Markets, September 2009

For four decades, Edimar Bentes and his family have survived by farming tiny clearings in the jungle near their dirt-floor shack in the state of Para in the Brazilian Amazon. On this April afternoon, Bentes, 56, squats in the driving rain and dips a glass into what just four years ago was a crystal-clear stream that provided drinking and bathing water. He frowns as the glass fills with brown silt. A thin man with short-cropped dark hair and a tanned, deeply wrinkled forehead, Bentes gazes around his land. There are no signs of the deer, armadillos and pacas he used to hunt to feed his wife and 10 children. For Bentes and thousands of others in the Juruti region of Para whose livelihood depends on wildlife and plants, everything changed in 2006.

That’s when New York-based Alcoa Inc., the world’s second-largest primary aluminum producer, started to bulldoze a 56-kilometer (35-mile) swath of the rain forest across hundreds of families’ properties to build a railway. This cleared corridor, 100 meters (109 yards) wide, will lead to a mine that will chew up 10,500 hectares (25,900 acres) of virgin jungle over three decades. More than half of the mine will lie inside a forest that by Brazilian federal law is supposed to be preserved unharmed forever for local residents. By year’s end, Alcoa says, the railway will transport 7,000 tons a day of bauxite, the dark red ore that’s used to make aluminum, from the mine to a port on the Amazon River.

‘Want to Cry’

“It makes you want to cry when you see this stream,” says Bentes, his bare feet sinking into the mud. He views a wasteland of uprooted trees and brown rivulets seeping into the water. “It reminds me of everything bad that Alcoa did to our land.” A growing array of evidence in court documents puts Alcoa among the multinational corporations that prosecutors accuse of destroying or causing destruction of the world’s largest rain forest.

Brazilian federal and Para state prosecutors sued Alcoa’s Brazilian mining subsidiary in 2005 in an effort to block the Juruti mine, saying the company had circumvented the law by not applying for a federal permit and instead seeking a license from the state of Para. After four years of legal haggling, the suit is still pending. Alcoa, which denies any wrongdoing, has already completed construction of the railway, port and processing plants. It’s now ready to start mining. “The state agency has no power to give anyone full rights to exploit land, especially in the case of a reserve,” state prosecutor Raimundo Moraes says. “Alcoa invaded the area, undeterred. Alcoa has no shame.”

‘All Necessary Licenses’

In written responses to questions from Bloomberg News, Alcoa says it “has all necessary government licenses to implement the Juruti mining project.” The Amazon, which spans nine countries and is roughly the size of Australia, has for centuries been the lungs of the Earth, its plants and trees absorbing pollution from the air. But that strength is fading. The world’s largest inhaler of carbon dioxide is shrinking — thus aggravating, instead of slowing, global warming.

Every week, federal prosecutors say, people acting outside the law use bulldozers, chain saws or fire to wipe out parts of the jungle to make way for crops, cattle and mines. The fires men set to clear land for ranches and farms create 6 percent of the carbon dioxide spewed into the air worldwide, according to the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists. That equates to half of all the emissions from cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships in the world.

‘Amazon is the Key’

Brazil has become the planet’s fourth-biggest polluter. The fires that rage across the Amazon could help increase Earth’s average surface temperature by as much as 11.5 degrees this century, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists from 194 countries.

Global warming threatens to melt glaciers, raise sea levels and lead to drinking water shortages, the United Nations- sanctioned panel says. “We are not going to reduce global warming if we don’t do something about deforestation in the Amazon,” says Doug Boucher, director of the Tropical Forest and Climate Initiative at Concerned Scientists. “It’s that simple, and very alarming. The Amazon is a big part — if not the key part — of a solution to deal with global warming.”

Wal-Mart, McDonald’s

To date, companies and individuals have destroyed more than 857,000 square kilometers (331,000 square miles) of the Amazon, an area almost the size of France and England combined, according to the UN Environment Programme. Cattle ranchers have caused 80 percent of the illegal deforestation, according to Brazil’s environment ministry. They sell steers to Brazil’s three biggest beef producers. One of them, Sao Paulo-based JBS SA, is the world’s largest; the others are Santo Andre-based Marfrig Alimentos SA and Bertin SA of Lins.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s biggest retailer; French supermarket chain Carrefour SA; and McDonald’s Corp. have purchased beef from those companies, according to Brazilian internal revenue service sales and export records. Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co. and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz have bought leather for car and truck seats from Auburn Hills, Michigan-based Eagle Ottawa LLC, a leather company supplied with materials from illegally deforested ranches, the records show. These multinationals say they’re working to avoid buying products originating in deforested land.

Cargill’s Port

Alcoa is the latest company in a decade-long legacy of global corporations that have thwarted Brazil’s environmental regulations, federal prosecutors say. Minneapolis-based Cargill Inc., the largest privately held company in the U.S., spent $20 million to build a grain port on the Amazon River in 2003 that led to farmers illegally destroying thousands of hectares of rain forest to grow soybeans, says Felicio Pontes, a federal prosecutor who sued to block the project. In early February, soybeans were piled high in a storage area at Cargill’s Amazon port, waiting to be loaded onto a ship bound for Europe. The company ships about 60,000 tons of soybeans a year grown near the town of Santarem. Before Cargill built the port, there was no large-scale soybean production in the area.

‘Completely Obvious’

Cargill hired The Nature Conservancy, an Arlington, Virginia-based nonprofit group, to confirm that soybean farmers aren’t clearing the Amazon around Santarem. The group says it has certified this year that 155 of 383 farms weren’t deforesting. “It’s completely obvious that Cargill’s port gave an incentive that led to deforestation,” Pontes says.

Both Alcoa and Cargill, prosecutors say, have persuaded local officials to sign off on their plans, flouting federal law. Brazil’s constitution says minerals are national resources that should be overseen by tougher federal agencies, says Daniel Azeredo, a federal prosecutor in the Amazon port of Belem, who specializes in environmental lawsuits. “The problem is that in Brazil we have weak institutions and laws, and companies take advantage of that,” he says. “We have laws, but they are impossible to enforce, which gives companies complete impunity to do whatever they want to profit.” Alcoa says it has abided by the law.

‘Any and All’

“In Brazil, public attorneys tend to challenge in court any and all major industrial and infrastructure projects,” Alcoa wrote in responses to questions from Bloomberg News. Alcoa says it doesn’t need federal approval for its mine in Juruti. Cargill also says it has done the right thing in Brazil. The company won proper state approval to build its river transport center, says Afonso Champi Jr., Cargill’s external affairs director in Brazil. He says the company strives to guarantee the soybeans it buys don’t come from deforested land.

Alcoa, which mines and produces aluminum in 31 countries, champions itself as a responsible steward of global resources. “Operating in a manner that protects and promotes the health and well-being of the environment is a core value to Alcoa,” the company says on its Web site. Cargill, whose products worldwide include animal feed, salt, steel and financial services, says, “Being socially responsible as a corporation means that we care about the environment.”

EPA Settlement

Alcoa has clashed with regulators and environmentalists in other countries. The University of Massachusetts’s Political Economy Research Institute ranks Alcoa as the 15th-most-toxic company in the U.S. In 2003, Alcoa agreed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department to pay about $330 million to clean up air pollution at a power plant within an aluminum factory in Rockdale, Texas — a plant it has since shut down.

Alcoa has received mixed notices in Australia. In 1990, the UN Environment Programme gave the company an award for replanting forests it had destroyed to build a bauxite mine there. Alcoa, which generates electricity to process aluminum, obtained the lowest score in a 2008 review of utilities by the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF said Alcoa had failed to adopt targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions by its coal-fired power plant in Victoria state.

Slashed Emissions

Alcoa says it gets rapped by environmentalists because its electrical power plants emit carbon. The company says it should get credit for all of the pollution it’s preventing by supplying the lightweight aluminum that makes cars and trucks more energy- efficient. Alcoa says it has slashed its greenhouse gas emissions by 36 percent since 1990.

In Brazil, Alcoa is doing business in a political climate that regulators say is favorable to polluters. Luciano Evaristo, a director at Ibama, the federal environmental agency, says forces in the government — starting at the very top — promote and finance industries that feed on illegal destruction of the rain forest. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva calls himself an environmentalist. In 2003, he introduced a plan to protect the Amazon, creating task forces to raid areas being deforested.

Copenhagen Conference

In December, Lula will join leaders from almost 200 other countries in Copenhagen at a UN-sponsored conference to discuss a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first major international pact on global warming.“ At Copenhagen, we will have to reach a global agreement that will be both just and ambitious if we want to bequeath a viable planet to future generations,” Lula said in a July 7 speech. Lula set a goal of reducing deforestation by 80 percent by 2020.

At the same time, Lula has authorized the building of new roads and power plants in the Amazon and has increased funding for ranches and factories in deforested areas. In June, he congratulated people for tearing down trees to create farms spurring economic growth. “No one can say that someone is a criminal because he deforested,” Lula told a crowd of cheering ranchers in the Amazon city of Alta Floresta as he announced plans to legalize almost 300,000 ranches and farms built on illegally cleared land that once was rain forest.

‘Schizophrenic Government’

“It’s a completely schizophrenic government,” says Paulo Adario, who directs the Amazon campaign for nonprofit environmental group Greenpeace. “On one hand, they are combating deforestation. On the other, they are financing it.” Foreigners have been cutting down Latin America’s rain forests since the 1600s, when Spanish and Portuguese conquerors cleared jungles from Mexico to Brazil to build ships, farms and cities. In the 1960s and 1970s, Texaco Inc. drilled dozens of oil wells in Ecuador’s Amazon, destroying rain forest and polluting the region with poisonous wastes.

Alcoa, which produced the first commercially available aluminum in 1888, has 63,000 employees around the world. The company produces enough sheeting to make 100 billion cans of beer and soda a year. America’s largest aluminum producer sells ingots, sheets, wheels, fasteners and building materials to customers in the aerospace, packaging and automotive industries.

Stock Recovery

The company reported $26.9 billion in revenue last year. Its share price, which peaked at $47.35 in July 2007, slid as low as $5.22 on March 6 during the global economic meltdown. The stock value has since increased to $11.46, as of July 30, up 1.8 percent in the year-to-date. Brazil has the world’s third-largest reserves of bauxite. In 1979, a group led by Rio de Janeiro-based Vale SA built a bauxite mine in Porto Trombetas, 60 kilometers from Juruti. In 1994, Alcoa joined Vale in the venture, whose other members today include Melbourne-based BHP Billiton Ltd. and Rio Tinto Plc of London.

The scarred land and fouled water around Porto Trombetas bears witness to the impact of the mine. Nearby, a lake called Lago Batata still turns bright red from bauxite wastes workers dumped for a decade. The venture says it stopped polluting the lake in 1989 and now uses sealed holding ponds to contain overflow. The consortium replanted trees on the banks of the lake, but they’re low to the ground and brittle. Ademar Cavalcanti, the mine’s environmental director, says the cleanup will go on indefinitely.

Revived Project

Alcoa inherited its Juruti mining rights from Reynolds Inc., which it bought in 2000. Alcoa revived the project in 2003, as global economic growth increased demand. Simao Jatene, the governor of Para, supported the Alcoa project. BNDES, Brazil’s national development bank, provided the company with 1.9 billion reais ($1 billion) of financing for construction.

In January 2005, Alcoa requested state permits to build the $1.7 billion mine. Gabriel Guerreiro, who was then Para’s environment secretary, says the company submitted an impact study done by an independent firm, Sao Paulo-based CNEC Engenharia SA. Guerreiro says his agency analyzed Alcoa’s proposal and concluded the mine would be modern and efficient. Guerreiro says Para’s mineral riches must be explored for the good of the state’s 7.1 million residents, 50 percent of whom live in poverty.

‘Rich Civilization’

“Nobody is going to build a rich civilization without using the natural resources of the tropics,” he says. Guerreiro gave Alcoa a preliminary license in June 2005 and asked for 35 improvements to the impact study. After Alcoa made adjustments, he recommended the project be accepted by the state environmental council, called Coema, which approved it in August 2005.

A month later, federal and state prosecutors sued Omnia Minerios Ltda., the Santarem-based Alcoa subsidiary running the mine; Para’s state government; and Ibama, the federal regulator. The government’s civil suit, filed in federal court in Santarem, says Omnia Minerios was required to seek and obtain a federal environmental permit. Prosecutors say Ibama failed by not taking control of the licensing process. In court filings, Alcoa and the two regulators each say they followed proper procedures.

Court to Court

The case against Alcoa has languished for four years as the participants argue over which level of the Brazilian judicial system — federal or state — should have jurisdiction. Franklin Feder, Alcoa’s Sao Paulo-based president for Latin America and the Caribbean, says Ibama advised Alcoa to get state approval for the mine.

Marcus Luiz Barroso Barros, Ibama’s president from 2003 to 2007, says no one told him about such a decision. He says he didn’t know about Alcoa’s project until after the company had applied for licensing with Para. At that point, he decided it would be too complicated for Ibama to get involved — a position he now regrets. “Now that I know more about Alcoa’s mine, looking at the significant impact it’s having in the area, I’d say it’s a major project that should have been handled by the federal agency,” says Barros, 61, a physician who’s now in private practice in the Amazon city of Manaus.

Licensing Guidelines

A government advisory panel called Conama lays out guidelines for when Ibama should get involved in reviewing a project. “Ibama shall be responsible for the environmental licensing for projects and activities with a significant environmental impact of a national or regional scope,” Conama Resolution 237 says.

State regulators aren’t as reliable as the federal government, Barros says. “The main problem with licensing by state agencies is that they are often too close to projects and fall victim more easily to political and economic pressures than Ibama,” he says. “They may be more easily manipulated.” The state licensing of the Juruti mine was riddled with irregularities, the prosecutors’ suit says. Alcoa’s consultants limited their environmental research to two separate one-month periods during the dry season, in a jungle with some of the highest rainfall levels in the world, prosecutors say.

‘Comprehensive’

The researchers didn’t analyze how the mine, which will consume 505 cubic meters (133,407 gallons) of water per hour from an Amazon River inlet, will affect fishing. They also didn’t study how heavy ship traffic would affect fish populations near the port, prosecutors say. “All environmental studies, conducted by qualified specialists, were comprehensive, as demonstrated by the fact that all necessary licenses were duly granted,” Alcoa said in its responses to questions from Bloomberg News.

Fatima de Sousa Paiva, a nun and community organizer who’s spent almost a decade near the Juruti mine area, says Alcoa approached the rain forest community like Portuguese explorers who grabbed Brazil in the 16th century. “Alcoa offered gifts like plastic sandals, thermoses and bicycles,” says Paiva, 48, who teaches at a local elementary school. “To them, we were just some ignorant Indians in the way of their plans to make billions.” In its written response, Alcoa said, “This is a groundless allegation.”

‘Provide for the People’

In granting Alcoa permission to mine in the Juruti preserve, Para officials clashed with Incra, the federal government’s land reform institute. By law, the reserve can be used only by residents to hunt, fish and gather nuts to sustain their families. “The reserve allows a way to make sure the land is able to provide for the people,” the law says. All decisions about land use must be made by residents of the community, according to the law.

“Maybe the state wanted to play Alcoa’s game by approving an environmental licensing process that was full of holes, but we didn’t,” says Luciano Brunet, who runs Incra’s office in Santarem. Brunet says Alcoa told residents that they didn’t have a right to stop the mine because they didn’t have title to the land.

Public Land

Most of the ground in the Amazon is owned by the government, according to Imazon, a Belem-based nonprofit group. Incra gave descendants of Mundurucu and Muirapinima Indians the right to use the land in 1981 without granting titles to the families. Incra certified the land as a federal reserve in November 2005. Brazil’s laws regarding property deeds in the Amazon have always been lax, Brunet says, because until recently no one has challenged them. “Those people don’t own the land,” says Alcoa’s Tiniti Matsumoto Jr., who has run the mine since 2005 and has worked at Alcoa for 40 years.

“That land issue is Incra’s problem, not Alcoa’s.” Alcoa doesn’t own the property either, prosecutor Moraes says. “Alcoa simply assumed it was authorized to mine an area that is protected, where people live off the land,” Moraes says. Soon after Alcoa received approval from the state to build the mine, Bricio Lima, the company’s community affairs director, went from house to house, asking families to cede part of their land. In the end, Alcoa secured the right of way through land where 81 families live.

No Choice

Bentes, the farmer whose stream is now filled with brown silt, says Lima told his family and their neighbors that residents had no choice but to cooperate because Alcoa had approval from the state. Lima said Alcoa offered the family 23,000 reais, which equals about 17 months of the median income in Brazil, to use 2.5 hectares of their land, Bentes says. He says he agreed to the deal because he had no choice. “He told us the railroad would go through our land whether we accepted the offer or not,” Bentes says, as he prepares to roast half a deer he hunted for two days with a friend.

Alcoa wanted to pay them something, even though it wasn’t required by law, Lima says. “There was nothing forcing us to pay any compensation,” says Lima, who confirms Bentes’s account of their discussions.

‘The Right Thing’

Brunet says his agency plans to grant land titles to local residents, allowing them to request royalty payments from Alcoa’s mine production.

Matsumoto, 59, a Brazilian of Japanese descent, says the company is willing to pay people who live in the reserve part of its royalty payments to the government — 1.5 percent of the mine’s revenue — if that’s what officials want. “We want to be here for at least 70 years, so of course we want to do the right thing,” he says.

Alcoa is paying Conservation International, an Arlington- based nonprofit group, $100,000 a year to create a trust fund to finance the preservation of 10 million hectares of parks and preserves around Juruti. Since 2005, the company has spent 10 million reais to improve roads and build schools, water treatment units, a health-care center and a government building in Juruti, Alcoa says.

Replanting Trees

In 2008, the company commissioned a poll of 600 people in the region, finding that 61 percent said the mine project had improved their lives. Two-thirds of those questioned didn’t live close to the mine, Alcoa says.

Matsumoto says Alcoa will replant every tree it destroys. It will send forestry engineers and biologists ahead of the excavators to catalog plants and animals in all of the jungle Alcoa cuts down. “When we start planting trees at the mine, we want to make it richer than the original forest,” Matsumoto says.

Patricia Elias, a forestry expert for the Union of Concerned Scientists, says Matsumoto’s goal is impossible to achieve. “It would take centuries for trees to grow to their original density and height — and it would never be better than virgin forest,” she says. “It’s of greater value in combating climate change to avoid deforestation in the first place.”

‘Just Doesn’t Work’

Andre Clewell, a botanist in Ellenton, Florida, who is a consultant on restoration of mines, says it’s difficult to quickly restore tropical trees. “You can try to grow 200-year-old trees in 50 years, but it just doesn’t work,” Clewell, 75, says. “And some of it never comes back.”

About 160 kilometers from the Juruti mine, green fields of soybeans stretch to the horizon near Santarem, flanked by narrow stands of the rain forest that once covered all of the area. Scorched trees lie on the ground at the far end of Edno Cortezia’s farm, where workers set fire to the forest to make way for crops. Cortezia says he’s growing soybeans where the jungle once stood because Cargill built a port 30 kilometers away at the confluence of the Amazon and Tapajos rivers. “We came here because of the port,” Cortezia says. Cargill’s Champi says the company will remove Cortezia as a supplier if it can confirm the deforestation.

Pot-Holed Highways

Before Cargill built its port, there were no soybean farms near Santarem, says Marcus Bistene, chief of enforcement at Ibama’s Santarem office. Pontes, the federal prosecutor, says Cargill bypassed federal environmental law to build a port without properly studying how it would affect the Amazon.

In the mid-1990s, Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural company by revenue, was looking for an alternative to trucking grains down pot-holed highways from the fields of Mato Grosso state in western Brazil to the ports of Santos and Paranagua, 2,000 kilometers south.

They set their sights on a highway through the heart of the soybean belt from the Amazon to Santarem, Champi says. At the time, Cortezia farmed land in the state of Mato Grosso, near the southern border of the Amazon. He says Cargill officials came to town, urging farmers to move to Santarem, where it would be less expensive to grow soybeans. This season, he’s harvesting soybeans on his farm near Santarem that he plans to sell to Cargill.

EPA Brushes

Cargill has 160,000 employees in 67 countries and reported $120 billion in revenue in 2008. Founded in 1855 by William Cargill, it’s still primarily family owned. It has been in Brazil since 1965, when it started producing and selling hybrid corn seeds. Within two decades, Cargill grew into Brazil’s top trader and exporter of soybeans and oilseed.

Like Alcoa, Cargill has had brushes with environmental regulators. In the U.S., the EPA has cited the company for polluting rivers and killing fish populations. In 2005, Cargill signed an agreement with the EPA and the Justice Department settling charges that the company had underestimated air pollution at corn and soybean processing plants in 13 states. Cargill agreed to spend $130 million to reduce pollution at 27 plants, pay a fine of $1.6 million and finance $3.5 million in environmental programs.

‘Long History’

Cargill standards for protecting the environment are stricter than the EPA’s in some cases, spokeswoman Lori Johnson says. “Cargill has a long history of voluntarily reducing its emissions and other environmental impacts,” Johnson says. In 2000, Pontes filed suit in federal court to halt construction of Cargill’s port, arguing that the company hadn’t done a proper environmental study. Cargill contested the suit, saying it had approval from Para’s environmental agency.

As the case was pending, Cargill finished the port in 2003. In March 2007, a Brazilian federal judge shut down the port until the company did a comprehensive environmental study. Cargill won a reversal of that decision on appeal. In 2006, Greenpeace reported it had traced soybeans from the port to illegally deforested land. Since then, Cargill has refused to buy soybeans grown on newly deforested land, Champi says. Three days ago, Cargill and other grain exporter in Brazil extended until July 2010 a commitment not to buy soybeans from farms that were cleared from the Amazon since 2006.

74 Million Cows

Ranchers, more than anyone else, have illegally flattened thousands of square kilometers of publicly owned rain forest to create pastures for cattle, Pontes says. More than 74 million cows graze in the Amazon today, covering a combined area larger than Spain. Ranchers are proud of what they have done to improve the local economy. Ataides Gomes de Oliveira, a foreman on the Itacaiunas ranch near Xinguara, walks among a wasteland of scorched logs and splintered stumps. He stops as cattle appear amid the ragged ferns and saplings.

“There are 6,000 cows here, where there used to be unproductive jungle,” he says. Sao Paulo-based Agropecuaria Santa Barbara Xinguara SA, which owns Itacaiunas, says it’s not responsible for managing the ranch and has never illegally cleared jungle. McDonald’s gets some of the beef for its Big Macs from a meatpacker supplied by ranches cleared from the Amazon, cattle sales permits show.

Deforesting Fines

McDonald’s supplier of hamburger patties in Brazil, Braslo Produtos de Carne Ltda. in Sao Paulo, has bought beef from its parent, Marfrig Alimentos. Four ranchers that supply Marfrig have been fined a total of 13.5 million reais for illegally clearing the rain forest, public records show. Marfrig has never bought “regularly” from ranches that don’t follow Brazil’s environmental law, says Ricardo Florence, director of planning and investor relations. The company demands its suppliers follow all laws. It won’t buy from suppliers that Ibama has placed on a list of “embargoed” ranches cited for illegal deforestation, Florence says.

The ranchers who were fined aren’t on that list, so Marfrig has no way of knowing their background on deforestation, he says. “The Marfrig Group does not buy from suppliers that contribute to deforestation of the Amazon,” Florence says.

McDonald’s Policy

Oak Brook, Illinois-based McDonald’s, which has had a policy of not buying beef from deforested land since 1989, says it relies on its suppliers to follow the law. “Every McDonald’s beef supplier has signed and affirmed its compliance with this policy,” says Bob Langert, McDonald’s vice president of corporate social responsibility. “They are aware that McDonald’s will immediately cease accepting raw materials from any facility that is found to source cattle for McDonald’s from within the Amazon.” Marfrig complies with McDonald’s policy, Florence says.

JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, has purchased cattle from fined ranchers. JBS owns Swift & Co. and part of Smithfield Foods Inc. in the U.S. and has nine plants in the Amazon. Kraft Foods Inc.’s division in Italy and a unit of H.J. Heinz Co. have bought beef from JBS, according to sales and export records. The number of slaughterhouses in the Amazon has tripled to 87 since 2004, as international meat exporters expanded into the rain forest, prosecutors say.

‘It’s the Meatpackers’

“If you want to know who is financing the deforestation, it’s the meatpackers,” Ibama director Evaristo says.

Angela Garcia, director of environmental affairs at JBS, says the company counts on government enforcement records to ensure cattle come from land that wasn’t illegally deforested. “We’re not in enforcement,” she says. “We don’t have the resources. I hope the ranches are complying with the law, but I cannot say whether they are.”

Evaristo says virtually all Amazon ranchers built pastures on land that was illegally deforested. “These are people who operate with 100 percent illegality,” he says. “They steal public land, destroy the rain forest, plant grass and let the cows graze until they’re fat enough to sell.”

In Sao Felix do Xingu, the municipality in the Amazon with the most cattle, only one ranch out of hundreds has a license. On June 1, Ibama and federal prosecutors filed suit against 21 cattle ranches, accusing them of illegally deforesting 150,000 hectares of rain forest.

Stopped Buying Beef

Prosecutors say that meatpacker Bertin sold beef from cattle that had been raised on illegal ranches to 41 of its customers –including Carrefour and Wal-Mart. Prosecutors sent a letter to all Bertin customers recommending they stop buying meat that comes from deforested land. By June 19, Carrefour, Wal-Mart and 33 other buyers had told Azeredo that they had stopped buying from Bertin and other meatpackers named in the lawsuit.

Bertin says it stopped buying from 14 ranches named in the suit and signed an agreement with prosecutors to develop tighter controls to ensure cattle suppliers follow the law. “We’ve suspended cattle purchases from deforested ranches and will help ranchers stop deforesting the Amazon and replant areas that have been devastated,” Bertin spokeswoman Simone Soares says.

‘A Matter of Cost’

Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart says it wants to buy only beef raised on ranches that follow the law. The company had suspected that ranchers were destroying the Amazon, says Daniela De Fiori, Wal-Mart’s vice president for sustainability in Brazil. “The truth is, Brazil’s retail sectors rely on these companies,” De Fiori says. “And it’s a matter of cost.”

On July 17, Wal-Mart launched a global initiative to urge all of its suppliers to assess and label the environmental impact of all their products, going back to the source of raw materials. Spokespeople for Carrefour, Heinz, Kraft and car companies Ford, GM and Mercedes say they have policies against buying products from deforested land and requiring suppliers to assure them they follow the law. Leather producer Eagle Ottawa, which is a unit of Whitehall, Michigan-based Everett Smith Group Ltd., says it’s satisfied with Bertin’s agreement with prosecutors to stop buying from illegally deforested ranches.

Shrinking Amazon

In Juruti, where Alcoa has its bauxite mine, the jungle is dotted with mahogany, Brazil nut trees and marble-textured angelin-pedra trees. These hardwoods can grow to almost 50 meters. Under the thick canopy of that timber are giant ferns and palms. This Amazonian vegetation, which has long absorbed the world’s carbon dioxide, is now shrinking at a rate of 163 square kilometers a week, exacerbating the global warming that threatens to wreak havoc worldwide. Lima, Alcoa’s community relations manager, a heavyset man with thinning hair, drives a pickup truck on the freshly cleared land for the mine. The rain forest gives way to a 700-meter-wide muddy pit that steams in the sun after a cloudburst.

Jungle topsoil and clay have been stripped away, exposing bauxite 15 meters down. Dump trucks are lined up, waiting for work to begin. Lima points to the pit, saying that beginning in late August, excavators will fill trucks with 90-ton hauls of bauxite once mining starts. Bulldozers will move ahead, clearing the rain forest to make way for heavy machinery to advance in a mining trench 50 meters wide.

Train Sits Empty

In a clearing a few kilometers away, conveyor belts lead to a tower where clay and other waste material will be washed from the ore. Not far from the pit, a train sits empty, ready to be loaded with bauxite. Alcoa has already torn down 900 hectares of rain forest, Lima says. Within 30 years, the mine will consume more than 10 times that much jungle, according to the company.

Bentes and his family show where Alcoa workers strip the rain forest. “We don’t know many things, and we are very simple people,” Bentes says, adding that he does understand the value of economic development in Brazil. “But they should find a way to do that without destroying the rain forest,” he says. “That is not right.”

—

Michael Smith is a senior writer at Bloomberg News in Santiago, Mssmith@bloomberg.net; Adriana Brasileiro is a reporter in Rio de Janeiro,abrasileiro@bloomberg.net.

By Miriam Rose

The economic issues currently causing mass demonstrations in Iceland have a less publicised ecological cousin, and one which the IMF has recently identified as part of the economic collapse. In 1995 the Ministry of Industry and Landsvirkjun, the national power company, began to advertise Iceland’s huge hydropower and geothermal energy potential. In a brochure titled “Lowest energy prices!!” they offered the cheapest, most hard working and healthiest labour force in the world, the cleanest air and purest water – as well as the cheapest energy and “a minimum of environmental red tape” to some of the world’s most well known polluting industries and corporations (such as Rio Tinto and Alcoa). This campaigning has led to the development of an ‘Energy Master Plan’ aimed at damming almost all of the major glacial rivers in Iceland, and exploiting all of the geothermal energy, for the power intensive aluminium industry. The loans taken by the Icelandic state to build large scale energy projects, and the minimal payback they have received from the industry, has been a considerable contributing factor to the economic crisis, while at the same time creating a European ecological crisis that is little heard of.

The Largest Wilderness in Europe
I first visited Iceland in 2006 and spent a week with activists from the environmental campaign Saving Iceland, a network of individuals from around Europe and Iceland who decry the fragmentation of Europe’s largest wilderness in favour of heavy industry. From these informed and passionate folk I learned of the 690 MW Kárahnjúkar dam complex being built in the untouched Eastern Central Highlands to power one Alcoa aluminium smelter in a small fishing village called Reydarfjörður. The dams formed the largest hydro-power complex in Europe, and were set to drown 57 km² of beautiful and virtually unstudied wilderness, the most fertile area in the surrounding highlands. Ultimately it would affect 3% of Iceland’s landmass with soil erosion and river silt deprivation. They also explained how materials in the glacial silt transported to the oceans bonds with atmospheric CO₂, sinking carbon. The damming of Iceland’s glacial rivers not only decreases food supply for fish stocks in the North Atlantic, but also negatively impacts oceanic carbon absorption, a significant climatic effect. After taking part in demonstrations at the construction site of the Alcoa smelter (being built by famous Iraq war profiteers Bechtel), I went to see the area for myself.

Travelling alone on foot in this vast and threatening landscape was one of the most incredible and spiritual experiences of my life. I walked along the deep canyon of the crashing glacial river set to be dammed, as ravens soared above me and a sound like falling rocks echoed from distant mountains. I slept in grassy valleys and bathed in a warm waterfall which ran from a nearby hot spring as reindeer galloped in the distance. The midnight sun showed me the way to Snæfell mountain, from the top of which I could see from the Vatnajokull ice cap all the way to the dam construction site; across wetlands, black sand deserts and shadowy mountains. By the next year the dam’s reservoir would stretch across this whole area. I felt small and vulnerable and had a sense of the immense power of nature, and the even greater power of mankind to choose whether to preserve or to irreversibly destroy it.

Since then critiques of the completed Kárahnjúkar project have made it increasingly unpopular with the Icelandic public, who have become sceptical about the secretive nature of energy deals and the damage to nature. As a result, Landsvírkjun and the heavy industry lobby are now focussing on geothermal power which has a more benign reputation. Ultimately, it is proposed that all of the economically feasible hot spring areas in Iceland will be exploited for industrial use, including a number of sites located in Iceland’s central highlands, the beautiful heart of Iceland’s undisturbed wilderness. Landsvirkjun, without any irony, has termed Iceland ‘the Kuwait of the North’.

The following section challenges some of the myths about ‘green’ geothermal energy.

Renewable
Geothermal energy is created when boreholes are drilled into hot subsurface rock areas or aquifers, and turbines are powered by the emitted steam. They only have a sustainable production level if the surface discharge of heat is balanced by heat and fluid recharge within the reservoir (as occurs at undisturbed hot springs), but this is generally not sufficient for exploiting economically. The Geyser hot springs at Calistoga, USA experienced a 150% decrease in production over ten years, due to rapid exploitation to meet economic requirements, and there have been many similar cases. Geothermal boreholes in Iceland are usually modelled for only 30 years of productionⁱ.

Carbon-neutral
The concentration of carbon dioxide present in geothermal steam is a reflection of the chemical make up of the underground reservoir and is distinct to each area. The 400 MW of boreholes planned for another Alcoa smelter in the north of Iceland will release 1300 tonnes CO₂ per MWⁱⁱ. An average gas powered plant would produce only slightly more, 1595 tonne per MWⁱⁱⁱ. The total of 520,000 tonnes CO₂ for these fields alone is almost as much as what is produced by all of road transport in Iceland^iv.

Minimal environmental impact
Geothermal power accounts for 79% of Iceland’s H₂S and SO₂ emissions^v. In 2008, sulphur pollution from the Hellisheiði power station, 30 km away, was reported to be turning lamposts and jewelry in Reykjavík black, as a record number of objections was filed to two more large geothermal plants in the same area, which would have produced more sulphur and carbon emissions than the planned smelter they were supposed to power, and plans were put on hold.
Geothermal areas such as Hellisheiði are globally rare, very beautiful and scientifically interesting. Icelandic geothermal areas are characterised by colourful striking landscapes, hot springs, lavas and glaciers, and are biologically and geologically endemic to the country. Irreversible disturbance to these wild areas for power plants includes roads, powerlines, heavy lorries and loud drilling equipment.

Wishful green thinking?
In the desperate search for plausible alternatives to our fossil fuel economy, a number of well known British greens have been advocating a ‘European Grid’ energy future, in which Icelandic large scale hydro and geothermal power, and Saharan solar, are transferred by underwater cable to Britain and Europe^vi. It is quite understandable that such schemes look appealing, but it is also essential to have a realistic analysis of the impacts caused by these so-called sustainable technologies before we accept them as a panacea to our fossil fuel sickness.

The technological or pragmatic environmentalism in favour of super grids comes down to a proposal to sacrifice unique ecological areas for the greater good of living a resource-intensive life style ‘sustainably’. In contrast, for anyone who identifies with a natural area, it is easy to understand why it has a value of its own. This value can be seen as far greater than that of any of our possessions; it is in a sense, invaluable.

What can perhaps be concluded from this Icelandic green energy case study is that application of a technology that has been thought of as renewable, climate-friendly and low-impact, on the large scale that is associated with fossil fuels, makes it a lot like the technology it was supposed to replace. It has certainly been argued that technological systems tend to reproduce themselves independent of the specific technologies^{vii viii}. Simply applying a different technology to address issues that are not entirely technological, is not addressing the problem of our consumptive lifestyles. But it can irrevocably end the existence of a place that is not like any other.

References:

i E.g. VGK (2005), Environmental Impact Assesment for Helisheidarvirkjun [online]. URL http://www.vgk.is/hs/Skjol/UES/SH_matsskyrsla.pdf [Accessed August 15, 2007].
ii Sigurðardóttir, R. Unpublished. Energy good and green. In: Bæ bæ Ísland (bye bye Iceland), to be published by the University of Akureyri and Akureyri Art Museum.
The data in this study is arrived at by calculation of the figures in site surveys for the Krafla, Bjarnarflag and Þeistareykir geothermal plants.
Sigurðardóttir has experienced threats and harassment by Landsvirkjun, the national power company, since 2000. In that year, she concluded the formal environmental impact assessment for a proposed large dam, Þjórsárver, a Ramsar treaty area, by stating there were significant, irreversible environmental impacts. The national power company did not pay her and refused to publish the report. Since then Sigurðardóttir has been refused all Icelandic government commissions. Since then, practically all EIAs for geothermal and hydro plants and smelters have been commissioned to the companies HRV and VGK, construction engineers rather than ecological consultancies and “the leading project management and consulting engineering companies within the primary aluminum production sector” (HRV. 2008. Primary aluminium production [online]. URL http://www.hrv.is/hrv/Info/PrimaryAluminumProduction/ [Accessed 13-12-2008]).
iii US Govt. Energy Information Administration. 2008. Voluntary reporting of greenhouse gases program. [online]. URL http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/coefficients.html [Accessed 13-12-2008].
iv Ministry of the Environment, Iceland (2006). Iceland’s Fourth National Communication on Climate Change. http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/natc/islnc4.pdf [Accessed August 15, 2007].
v Statistics Iceland. 2007. Emission of sulphur dioxides (SO2) by source 1990-2006 [online]. URL http://www.statice.is/Statistics/Geography-and-environment/Gas-emission [Accessed 12/12/2008]
vi E.g. Monbiot, G. (2008). Build a Europe-wide ‘super grid’ [online]. URL http://e-day.org.uk/solutions/charities/14536/george-monbiot–build-a-europewide-super-grid.thtml [Accessed 13-12-2008].
vii E.g. Mander, J. 1992. In the absence of the sacred. Sierra Club, San Francisco, CA.
viii Krater, J. 2007. Duurzame technologie, een contradictie? Buiten de Orde, zomer 2007.

Sermeq Kujalleq is the largest glacier in the northern hemisphere that flows out to sea. The icebergs it calves float along a fjord that was recognized as one of the wonders of the world when it was added to the 2004 World Heritage List by the United Nations, which cited its natural history, geology, and beauty.

Although millions of people across the world still aren’t convinced global warming exists or that it’s as big a problem as scientists claim, symptoms of the planet’s warming pop up everywhere in Greenland.

The summer fishing season is longer. Crops are being grown in areas never thought possible. Tourism is booming.

Interest in oil exploration and mining has hit a feverish pitch, with several ‘interesting’ projects under way, including the possibility of aluminum smelters being built there to take advantage of the island’s hydropower potential, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

A recent editorial in the Copenhagen Post said Greenland is ‘believed to be sitting on a mind boggling 10,000 billion kroner [nearly $2 trillion] worth of offshore oil reserves.’
Even the island’s first-ever craft brewery, Greenland Beer, is a product of global warming. The company markets the water it uses as purer than what is found in other parts of the world because it comes from melted inland ice formed thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution.

But Greenland’s long-term problems from global warming will likely overshadow such short-term gains.

A lack of sea ice has made winter passage between settlements more difficult, if not impossible. That’s a huge problem because there are no roads between villages. Greenland is one of the only places on Earth that relies on sled dogs as a primary mode of transportation.

Fishing is Greenland’s No. 1 industry. Mild winters, especially in Uummannaq on Greenland’s west coast, have made it treacherous for residents to fish or hunt on what little ice there’s been.

Greenland is the world’s top producer of halibut and cold-water prawns, or shrimp. Halibut in particular have become more elusive, plunging to greater depths as the ocean temperature has warmed. Other species are moving in, but those gains are offset by the movement of whales toward the coast.

Whales have become so common near Ilulissat that two of the village’s three tour operators began offering whale-watch excursions in 2007. Fishermen fear whales will act like vacuum cleaners, sucking down fish they want to catch.

Two leaders of the Ilulissat fishing community, Peter Olsen and Johanne Mathaussen, said the downward movement of halibut makes those fish more difficult and costly to catch. Full-sized halibut that used to be available at depths of about 1,000 feet now swim at depths of about 2,600 feet.

Another commercial fisherman, Gedion Lange, said long-line fishing he does with as many as 300 hooks at a time isn’t as productive as it was in the 1990s.

Ove Rosbach, who has fished the Arctic for decades, blamed the decline on warmer ocean currents flowing to the north. He said a similar phenomenon occurred in the 1950s.

Halibut returned when the ocean current cooled in the 1970s, but Mr. Rosbach said things feel different now. ‘[Even] when the sun is not shining, it’s still very warm,’ he said. ‘The sun is warmer than normal now.’

Niels Kristensen, an Ilulissat municipal official, said many fishermen can no longer catch what their quota allows. ‘It’s much more difficult because of the climate,’ he said.

Warming, cooling cycles
Greenland and its ice sheets are immense. The island spans 1,660 miles from north to south, longer than the distance from Maine to Cuba. From west to east, Greenland is 652 miles, just shy of the distance between Chicago and New York.

It is a fickle place. A Danish territory of 56,000 people, it has gone through extreme warming and cooling periods before.

Literature produced for visitors claims various cultures of Inuits have lived on Greenland for more than 4,500 years, although it also notes extensive periods in which the island had no inhabitants – usually when climatic conditions were so extremely cold there was little, if any, wildlife to hunt.

Legend has it the island got its name from a murderous Viking called Erik the Red, after he was ousted from Iceland about 950 A.D.

He reportedly put together a group of men to sail with him, with the lure of an island of lush greenery. That was more than 1,000 years ago, during the Medieval Warming Period – a climatic era that preceded the Little Ice Age and the island’s modern ice sheet.

That ice sheet today is a hotbed for research as scientists from across the world study how the island is melting, sometimes with lakes appearing out of nowhere and the melt water vanishing suddenly through deep crevices known as moulins.

Greenland may be a harbinger of things to come, although it is second to Antarctica terms of ice.

Seventy-seven percent of the planet’s fresh water is locked up in the ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica, with about 70 percent of that in Antarctica. Ninety-eight percent of Antarctica is still covered by ice compared to Greenland’s 80 percent.

Antarctica, the coldest and windiest place on Earth, is seven times the size of Greenland. It is less prone to melt. Portions of that continent’s ice sheet are actually thickening, a reminder of how much more rugged the South Pole is than the North Pole. Antarctica has 250 days a year that are 50 degrees below zero or colder.

Far-reaching effects
While politicians remain in a quandary over what to do about global warming, change is coming that will affect life everywhere from the Himalayan mountain range in Asia to the Great Lakes region of North America.

Peru’s political instability is further threatened by changes in water flow as glaciers retreat in the central Andes mountains, resulting in less water for agriculture and hydroelectric power.

Southern Africa is expected to lose 30 percent of its staple food, corn, by 2030. As London-based journalist Gwynne Dyer noted in a column earlier this year: ‘No part of the developing world can lose one-third of its main food crop without descending into desperate poverty and violence.’

And even if the most conservative estimate for sea level rise materializes – 1 meter, or about 3.3 feet of water by 2100 – low-lying regions of the South Pacific and South Asia will be flooded. The result could be a mass exodus of people from one of the poorest and most populated regions of the world.

America’s Gulf Coast, the southern tip of Florida, and parts of the Atlantic seaboard would be submerged as well.

The prospect of mass flooding by the end of this century, though, has taken a back seat to more immediate changes in the Arctic Circle’s northwest passage, especially with gasoline being sold in the United States between $3 and $4 a gallon.

Russia – second only to the Middle East in oil reserves – last year staked claim to the North Pole, where speculation about huge petroleum reserves runs rampant.

Once impassable to ships, the northwest passage has become a tug-of-war involving Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Greenland, and Iceland.

‘The potential is there for an outbreak of tensions we have not seen since the Cold War days,’ said Rob Huebert, associate director of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies.

The Arctic’s warming climate has opened up the passageway to more than just oil tankers and cargo ships.

Oliver Pitras, 48, of Norway, said he has seen sailboat traffic on the rise. He sailed through the northwest passage in 1999 and is spending five months crossing it now at the helm of a yearlong sailing expedition he began taking around the world May 17 to raise global awareness of climate change. Details of his trip are at 69nord.com. ‘We’re talking about the opening of a common route,’ he said. ‘But it’s still a delicate situation.’

Last year, several congressmen were stunned to learn that summer sea ice could be gone from the Arctic by 2015 – well ahead of the earlier projection of 2050, said Daniel Schrag, director of Harvard University’s Center for the Environment.

Human activity
Changes to the Earth’s climate are nothing new. Scientists believe natural climate variations occur every 100,000 years based on how the planet spins, tilts, and orbits around the sun.

The sun itself changes. NASA believes that volcanic eruptions on Earth, coupled with natural changes to the sun, explain warming and cooling from 1000 through 1850.

But the space agency also believes that Earth has been on a one-way warming trend triggered by human activity since the Industrial Revolution began about 1850.

Heat-trapping carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, is on a course to exceed 500 parts per million in the atmosphere later this century, something the human race has never experienced, Mr. Schrag said.

An abundance of greenhouse gases means higher temperatures on land and in the oceans. The gases rise in the atmosphere and trap the sun’s energy, keeping heat from escaping back into space.

A climate variation of 3 to 5 degrees ‘is a really big deal,’ considering that much of the Earth was covered in ice 18,000 years ago when the planet was only an average of 5 degrees cooler, Mr. Schrag said.

‘We are performing an experiment at a planetary scale that hasn’t been done for millions of years. No one knows exactly what will happen,’ he said.

‘Unequivocal’ warming
The scientific consensus about climate change is based primarily around evidence of increasing air and ocean temperatures, accelerated melting of snow and ice at the polar ice caps, and rising ocean levels.

Records on global surface temperatures only go back to 1850. But the world’s most prestigious body of climatologists – the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – noted in its landmark 2007 series of climate reports that the Earth’s average temperatures for 11 of the 12 years from 1995 to 2006 were at or near record-high levels.

Those reports concluded there has been ‘unequivocal’ warming of the planet and claimed with a certainty of greater than 90 percent that human activity was largely responsible. The data those reports used came, in part, from satellite images showing an accelerated loss of northern polar sea ice since 1978 and a rise in average sea levels since 1961 – accelerating after 1993.

About 600 scientists from 40 U.N. countries and the World Meteorological Organization were involved in producing those reports. Scientists directly involved with the panel’s work shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. Since losing the 2000 presidential race, Mr. Gore has given countless lectures across the country about global warming. He authored the book, An Inconvenient Truth, and won an Academy Award for the documentary based on it.

The greatest single source of human-generated carbon dioxide comes from coal-fired power
plants. Other major contributors include factories and automobiles.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change findings were preceded by a 2001 report by America’s most prestigious group of government scientists – the National Academy of Sciences – which stated explicitly that human activity has affected the Earth’s climate. Similar statements have been issued by a consortium of 13 federal agencies called the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.

‘A shared risk’
Ellen Mosley-Thompson of Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar Research Center said public officials and lobbyists have wasted valuable time disputing the science behind climate change.

She wonders how many naysayers would get into their automobiles without making some adjustments if they learned there was greater than a 90 percent chance they’d get in a wreck. ‘The difference is that [climate change] is a shared risk,’ she said.

People identify with symbols, but are they doing so at their own peril by dismissing climate change as some distant problem that just affects polar bears? Why aren’t connections being made?

The cost of dealing with climate change is one reason.

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain agree the United States must get more aggressive about controlling carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants but aren’t sure whether a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade approach is best.

The Edison Electric Institute said it cannot quantify how much a carbon tax would drive up electric bills but said the cost would be ‘substantial.’ Under a cap-and-trade program, the government would place a limit on emissions and force utilities to barter for carbon credits with other utilities.

A matter of degree
Few Toledoans probably realize they live in the 41st Parallel North, meaning they are 41 degrees above the equator, or less than halfway to the North Pole. The effects of climate change are more acute near the relatively uninhabited poles, where average temperatures are rising twice as fast as they are near the equator.

Most Ilulissat residents know they’re in the 69th Parallel North, which is 69 degrees above the equator and nearly two-thirds of the way to the North Pole. One of Ilulissat’s soccer teams is named I-69, after the village’s latitude.

Ilulissat is Greenland’s third-largest village, with 4,500 people and just as many sled dogs. Each summer, it hosts dozens of researchers and hundreds of tourists. Many of the latter see Greenland’s famous Eqi glacier breaking off into seawater from the comfort of luxury cruise ships.

Influential U.S. lawmakers, such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), have recently stayed in the village’s posh Hotel Arctic, as have celebrities such as pop singer Bjork and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. The hotel is in the midst of doubling in size.

Regardless where they stay, nearly everyone who visits Ilulissat seems to have a feeling of suspended reality when they open their hotel blinds each morning.

Almost without fail, the icebergs they saw the night before have been replaced by new ones.

How can such massive hunks of ice come and go so fast? After all, they were formed from thousands of years of compressed snow. And they look harder to budge than skyscrapers.

But it happens. The frequency that the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier calved icebergs over the past decade rose, throwing some of the world’s top Greenland experts for a loop.

One of them is Swiss-born Konrad ‘Koni’ Steffen of the University of Colorado. He has done field work in the Arctic since 1975 and on Greenland’s ice sheet at least once every year since 1990. His work is cited in major publications.

He is at the table of most major climate talks.

Conventional wisdom during the 1970s was that Greenland’s ice sheet would take thousands of years to melt.

‘Nobody would have predicted 10 to 15 years ago that Greenland would lose ice that fast,’ Mr. Steffen said. ‘That revises all of the textbooks.’

His take-home message: Forget the scientific modeling. Greenland is melting faster than anyone’s best guess.

‘How can you have an ice sheet so big and respond that quickly?’ he asked. ‘That is still part of the mystery, to be honest.’

Ohio State’s Jason Box is perhaps the most famous of Mr. Steffen’s former students, having done research in Greenland every summer except one since 1994.

Mr. Box has likewise gained attention from the national media for his work. He synthesizes data he and others generate into a ‘holistic’ view of Greenland’s thaw, using a number of tools, including time-lapse photography.

A costly problem
Americans may fret about paying more for electricity if the next Congress enacts a carbon tax or strict regulations on utilities to combat global warming. But Mr. Box said that cost will be a fraction of what adapting to climate change will cost, especially if nothing’s done to curb emissions now.

Billions of dollars will be needed to construct New Orleans-like levees along the nation’s coastline to guard against flooding, he said.

‘It’s going to get too expensive for the U.S. to mitigate,’ Mr. Box said. ‘It’s going to be kind of like taking on a global war against terrorism. It’s going to be too expensive. It’s going to sap the U.S. economy.’

Sea level rise is ‘going to cost people whether their properties are flooded or not,’ he said.

On average, Greenland’s ice sheet loses 300 billion tons of ice a year. That hasn’t been enough to raise global sea level a millimeter a year, though.

The Greenland ice sheet has been eroding almost annually for 50 years, except for a short period in the 1970s when temperatures were cool enough in summer to keep it ‘in balance’ by rejuvenating itself enough in winter.

But the greatest ice losses on record are recent – in 2003, 2005, and 2007, Mr. Box said.

Losing ground
In Alaska, coastal villages are eroding. Long stretches of highway are impassable for months at a time because they were built on permafrost that is melting.

One of the most impacted villages, Newtok (population 400), was told in June that it will get $3.3 million in state aid to help relocate displaced residents to higher ground.

Alaska is putting aside nearly $13 million to protect six remote villages in the coming year. That could only be the beginning of a massive tab for taxpayers. According to the Government Accountability Office, erosion and flooding affect 184 of Alaska’s 213 native villages to some degree.

In Greenland, Ilulissat’s soccer field is slumping because of permafrost melt. Tourists hiking marked trails to see the village’s famous glacier feel the spongy soil.

During the Republican National Convention, TV crews aired sound bytes from delegates who said they’ll leave the Earth’s climate in God’s hands.

‘It’s actually not a faith issue but whether or not you believe in the science. In its purest form [climate change] is objective science,’ Mr. Box said. ‘The ice in the Arctic is the canary in the coal mine. To put it bluntly, the canary is dead.’

A necessary evil?
There are currently three aluminium smelters in Iceland, with a fourth under construction and others planned. Iceland is one of the world’s top ten producers, despite having no bauxite (the main ingredient) and a population of barely 300,000. Aluminium has a huge share in the economy, accounting for 37% of exports in the early part of this year, compared with just 10% in 1995.

This investment boom is driven by one thing alone: cheap, clean power. Aluminium smelting is a very power-hungry business. Indeed, electricity accounts for such a high proportion of costs that it is worthwhile shipping the raw materials to a spot with cheap power, such as Iceland, and shipping the finished aluminium on again to consumers elsewhere.

Iceland has lots of rivers, and sits atop a volcanic ridge. Its electricity comes almost entirely from hydropower and geothermal plants. There are plenty of rivers left to dam, and lots of subterranean steam to tap. Local power companies have even started building power plants solely to cater to new smelters. Electricity consumption has more than doubled in recent years; Iceland now uses more power per person than any other country in the world. And consumption will only grow as more smelters are built.

But some Icelanders are beginning to have doubts. A planned expansion of the oldest smelter, near Reykjavik, was defeated in a local referendum last year. Saving Iceland wants to call a halt to all such projects. But the prime minister, Geir Haarde, argues that the protesters do not reflect the views of most Icelanders, especially in the smaller and more remote communities in the north and east of the country, who welcome smelters and the jobs they bring.

Others believe that Iceland has a moral obligation to use its plentiful clean energy for the benefit of the planet. If the aluminium is not made in Iceland, the theory runs, it will be made somewhere else, using much grubbier energy. Smelting has grown rapidly in China in recent years, for example, fuelled by coal-fired power. Were it not for Iceland, China would presumably be making even more aluminium. Iceland, in other words, should sacrifice its own landscape for the good of the planet.

Saving Iceland denounces that formula as a false dichotomy. If everyone lived more modest lives, it says, we would not need so much aluminium in the first place. But that sounds like wishful thinking. It might not be too much of a sacrifice for extravagant Westerners to drink fewer fizzy drinks from aluminium cans, and to take fewer flights in aluminium planes. But it is hard to believe that consumption of aluminium will fall any time soon, given the growing demand from developing countries.

What is more, even if more aluminium is not really needed, there are plenty of other good uses to which Iceland could put its green power. There is already talk of locating data centres there. What could be worthier than helping to keep the internet running? And if electricity is going to be made anywhere, it might as well be made where it does the least damage to the environment.

On the other hand, the damage to the environment from a new dam must seem enormous if you happen to live at the bottom of the valley being flooded. Not many people live anywhere in Iceland, it is true. But the few that do probably value the preservation of their immediate surroundings more than an intangible and, in the grand scheme of things, tiny contribution to the health of the atmosphere.

“Think globally, act locally” is a classic environmentalist’s rallying cry. But what should the green at heart do when the two are at odds?

Comments on this article on the Economist website.

We stand at a crossroads. The facts are clear. Global climate change, caused by human activities, is happening, threatening the lives and livelihoods of billions of people and the existence of millions of
species. Social movements, environmental groups, and scientists from all over the world are calling for urgent and radical action on climate change.
On the 30th of November, 2009 the governments of the world will come to Copenhagen for the fifteenth UN Climate Conference (COP-15). This will be the biggest summit on climate change ever to have taken place. Yet, previous meetings have produced nothing more than business as usual.
There are alternatives to the current course that is emphasizing false solutions such as market-based approaches and agrofuels. If we put humanity before profit and solidarity above competition we can live amazing lives without destroying our planet.

We need to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Instead we must invest in community-controlled renewable energy. We must stop over-production for over-consumption. All should have equal access to the global commons through community control and
sovereignty over energy, forests, land and water. And of course we must acknowledge the historical responsibility of the global elite and rich Global North for causing this crisis. Equity between North and South is essential.

Climate change is already impacting people, particularly women, indigenous and forest-dependent peoples, small farmers, marginalized communities and impoverished neighbourhoods who are also calling for action on climate-and social justice. This call was taken up by activists and
organizations from 21 countries that came together in Copenhagen over the weekend of 13-14 September, 2008 to begin discussions for a mobilization in Copenhagen during the UN’s 2009 climate conference.

The 30th of November, 2009 is also the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Organization (WTO) shutdown in Seattle, which shows the power of globally coordinated social movements.

We call on all peoples around the planet to mobilize and take action against the root causes of climate change and the key agents responsible both in Copenhagen and around the world. This mobilization begins now, until the COP-15 summit, and beyond. The mobilizations in Copenhagen and
around the world are still in the planning stages. We have time to collectively decide what these mobilizations will look like, and to begin to visualize what our future can be. Get involved!

We encourage everyone to start mobilizing today in your own neighbourhoods and communities. It is time to take the power back. The power is in our hands. Hope is not just a feeling, it is also about taking action.

To get involved in this ongoing and open process, sign up to this email
list:  climateaction at klimax2009.org

More info: http://klimax2009.org/

Last year, Das unfortunately had to cancel for the Saving Iceland conference ‘Consequences of heavy industry’ in Olfus, where Magnusson spoke as well as guests from Trinidad, South Africa, Brazil and various other countries. Saving Iceland is happy to finally have the opportunity to welcome Samarendra to Iceland.

On the 21st, there will also be a talk by Das in the Peace House, Njalsgata 87 (corner with Snorrabraut) at 20.00h.

As an investigative journalist and National Executive member of Samajwadi Jan Parishad, Samarendra has been involved in campaigning against bauxite mining for the last seven years. During this period he has been documenting the events and writing about it in various media including Tehelka and Vikalpa Vichar. He has also written three books and edited two, published around 200 articles and reviews on various issues, and is currently finishing a book on the aluminium industry and the local resistance with the anthroplogist Felix Padel.

He has also made a feature length documentary on the campaign called WIRA PDIKA (Earth worm: Company man) 124 mins, mini-dv, 2005 with Amarendra Das, who is an alumni of The Film and Television Institute of India.

Suggested Links:

• Double Death, Aluminium’s Links to Genocide by S. Das and F. Padel, in Economic and Political Weekly
• Agya, What do You Mean by Development? by Das and Padel. An exhaustive account of the aluminium industry in India.
• Saving Iceland Blockades Rio Tinto-Alcan Smelter in Hafnarfjordur (highly documented background to ALCAN and aluminium’s cultural genocide in Asia and Africa)
• And you might be interested in our Struggles in India image gallery.

As inflation rates in Iceland soared to 8.7% and the Icelandic krona lost a third of it’s value, US-based Century Aluminum started construction of a much disputed aluminium smelter at Helguvik, southwest of the capital Reykjavik. The Icelandic economy is suffering from overheating as billions are spent on construction of new power plants and heavy industry projects. The central bank raised the overnight interest rate to a whopping 15% to control further price increases as Icelanders see their money’s value disappearing like snow. It would seem that the last thing the tiny Icelandic economy needs is further capital injections.

But Icelandic investors are making record profits from the new projects. The value of shares sold to them by Century less than a year ago to finance the Helguvik smelter has increased by 33%, though the company has not made a profit in years.

Environmentalists contend the legality of the project. No environmental impact assessment has been made for the smelter port, power lines or geothermal drilling that threatens large tracts of wilderness. The company has also not secured greenhouse gas emissions quota.

“In essence, Century is running very tough brinkmanship and may end up dictating Iceland’s climate policy as if Iceland were a banana-democracy,” says Arni Finsson from the Iceland Nature Conservation Association.

The issue has become an embarrassing affair for the Icelandic government. Thorunn Sveinbjarnardottir, Minister for the Environment, says she opposes the new Century smelter and other projects. At the same time, Prime Minister Geir Harde is doing his best to negotiate new emission rights for them with the UN. Minister of Industry Ossur Skarphedinsson then commented that the Icelandic government has no control over the development or expansion of aluminum smelters in Iceland anyway.

This is the second time when the government has allowed for a smelter to be built without proper permits. The previous case, ALCOA Fjardaal, has raised Iceland’s per capita emissions from 12 to 18 tons. The European average is 11.

The government still says it aims for a reduction by 50-75 percent from those of 1990, by 2050. “No final decisions have been made on how to accomplish this,” says Anna Kristin Olafsdottir, political adviser to the environment minister, “but a scientific committee is working very hard on a plan.”

International activists from Saving Iceland have decided not to wait while the largest wilderness of Europe is being ruined, and have announced a direct action camp starting July 12th.

It is interesting to see how quickly Rio Tinto Alcan says it will sack its 3,500 workers at the slightest hint that its energy cost will increase. There’s job security for you! Recently the corporation announced that it was already “temporarily” cutting production at the smelter by 5% to threaten the New Zealand government to exempt themselves from its new emissions trading scheme. [02/05/08] Tiwai Point is owned by New Zealand Aluminium Smelters Limited who are mostly owned (79.36%) by Rio Tinto Alcan New Zealand Limited (formerly Comalco New Zealand Limited). Rio Tinto Alcan own the Straumsvik smelter in Hafnarfjordur, near Reykjavik, which they are still lobbying to enlarge despite a local referendum decision which vetoed their plans.

Source: Emissions bill ‘puts smelter at risk’, By MARTIN KAY – The Dominion Post

Watch the video on Youtube

‘Aluminium helps curb energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions,’ claims Lasse Nord (Hydro), one of the conference’s panel members. ‘Quite the contrary,’ says Anneleen Vermeers, a Saving Iceland spokesperson. ‘The aluminium companies are trying to greenwash their image, but this industry will always be an energy-intensive one. In order to supply their polluting smelters with that energy, Iceland is damming up all its big rivers. These gigantic dams are environmentally disastrous and contribute directly to global warming, still, that’s what they call ‘environmentally correct’!’

Some activists had also entered the hotel and the conference rooms to distribute brochures. These contained scientific facts and figures of the aluminium industry’s emission of CO2 and of other, more damaging greenhouse gasses (which are suppressed in the Kyoto Protocol), as well as toxic elements and heavy metals.

After a while, the hotel staff asked the uninvited guests to leave through the hotels’ front entrance. Around 9:15 the conference door was unlocked and cleared. Police threatened the activists whilst they continued to pass out flyers on the street and percussionists played samba music. In the end, however, nobody was arrested.

This action was supported by the Dutch-Belgian Earth First network: GroenFront!

For those of you who don’t already know me, my name is Miriam Rose, and I am an activist and environmental scientist from the UK. I have been asked to speak today on my experience of the basic values of Icelandic society, based on an interview I did on Kastljos in October, after I was threatened with deportation from Iceland for my part in actions against the heavy industry policy of your government. The letter of requested deportation which I received explained that I may be expelled from Iceland for a minimum of three years as my behavior constitutes a ‘threat to the fundamental values of society’.

In the interview I noted how telling I thought this choice of words, and raised the question: What are the fundamental values of Icelandic society? It seems that free speech, equal rights and the right to protest are not amongst them, so what does this sentence say? To me it revealed a very simple truth about the nature of the decision. I had questioned the right of market and economic values to dominate society and nature, through the policy of heavy industrialisation. In this accusation it was made painfully clear that these are the ‘fundamental values’ of today’s Icelandic society even at the expense of human freedoms, and those who question such values are not welcome here. I will go on to explore this hypothesis tonight.

Iceland is a country with a proud history and belief in strong democracy and human rights. It is certainly perceived from the outside as a country with a representative and refined democratic system, and peaceful and humanist values. But what are these basic values we are so proud of maintaining in such a developed society? There are two essential building blocks of commonly percieved fundamental values of society- the fundamental human rights and the basic democratic values. I will go on to examine some of these values in detail, in relation to their applications in modern Icelandic society.

Developed democracies claim to value above all the basic human rights; free speech, equal rights, freedom of movement etc. Rights that were defined by hundreds of years of social struggle against repressive regimes, for equality and freedom, and are now enshrined into UN conventions and government constitutions to put our minds at rest.

So let us start with equal rights, perhaps the most fundamental of these values, assumed by all and part of our everyday rhetoric on the advantages of western democracy. But how are our equal rights monitored and enforced? Well, if we feel we have been treated unequally our first stop is the law courts, designed to check the application of such rights and deliver justice. It is well known that our ability to be represented in the courts requires and depends on money; good lawyers, payment of court fees, time off work etc. So this system is fundamentally flawed and unequal.

Secondly it is the duty of governments and companies to practice and ensure equal rights in their policies and actions. But will they really do this at the expense of enormous profit margins? Big corporations and state economies operate by using cheap labour and products from countries with dubious human rights to give their customers cheap ‘value-added’ goods. Value in this sense means only the size of the dent in the purse, not the rights of those whose slave labour creates it.

To confuse the matter of equal rights further, the use of human rights terminology must also be monitored, as its original purpose is misused and mistreated in the court room. The European Court of Human Rights has in several cases awarded corporations the human rights of individuals. The idea is that by acting against a corporation, you are acting against its shareholders and their fundamental human rights. (ie by blockading a MacDonalds truck you restrict the freedom of movement of its shareholders). Even these conventions now serve to protect the rights of big business and capital growth, and do not represent the voiceless majority as they were intended.

In Iceland there is considerable evidence of terrible mistreatment of foreign workers at Karahnjukar dams. Illegal workers brought by construction company Impregilo had almost no rights in Icelandic society, and reports of deaths at the work site are accused of being grossly underestimated. They received no justice or equality here. The Icelandic state ignored this ill-treatment in favour of the profits promised by powerful companies like ALCOA, (and perhaps also in fear of speaking against corporations with such highflying connections).

Personally I have experienced considerable inequality in my treatment here. This summer i was sent directly to prison after being notified of a fine for disobeying the police. In contrast to the norm I was given no time to pay the amount and no right to appeal in the courts, and was sent immediately to prison where I was kept in isolation for 8 days, as there was not space in the womens prison for me. While inside I was told by the prison guards that this was very unusual as most women are pardoned a few times before being imprisoned in Iceland, hence the small number of female prisoners. They were quite surprised that a woman convicted of her first and non-violent crime would be treated this way. It seems that this unfair treatment was intentionally harsh as a warning to other protesters that they were not wanted by the state.

Let us move on to free speech. Unlike the controlled media of dictatorships and communist regimes, we pride ourselves on the free and unbiased press of the Western world. But how impartial is it really? Icelandic media is controlled by a few private groups and a small state run element, which accepts private finance. What are their interests? Can company owned and sponsored media really criticise its own, or associated companies, or report fairly on their economic abuses? In whose interest was it that lies about the payment of Saving Iceland activists were published by RÚV and never revoked despite complaints made through all the official channels?

I will use the pertinent form of questioning taken by tribal rights activists in India, whom I have worked with and ask:
Free speech for whom? At what cost?

Thirdly, and in strong relation to my experience, what of freedom of assembly or the right to demonstrate? When our ability to express ourselves through the democratic system or the free media fails, this is an essential human right to test our democracy and the existence of our perceived fundamental human rights and values. On this subject i will read from an essay by booker prize winning Indian author Arundhati Roy:

“The only way to make democracy real is to begin a process of constant questioning, permanent provocation, and continuous public conversation between citizens and the State. That conversation is quite different from the conversation between political parties. (Representing the views of rival political parties is what the mass media thinks of as ‘balanced’ reporting.)

It is important to remember that our freedoms such as they are, were never given to us by any government, they have been wrested from them by us. If we do not use them, if we do not test them from time to time, they atrophy. If we do not guard them constantly, they will be taken away from us. If we do not demand more and more, we will be left with less and less.” (Roy, 2005)

In several instances the Icelandic State has shown its intolerance to the right of freedom of assembly, and to methods of civil disobedience as a form of protest. (Despite huge admiration for the use of these methods in defining our civil rights and freedoms). In 2002 any person suspected of being a member of the Falun Gong (a strictly pacifist human rights movement), were arrested or denied entry into Iceland at the request of a corrupt and internationally frowned upon government. (China.)

As a personal anecdote, I often use an example from my treatment here last summer. After being arrested and taken to Eskifjorður police station after a protest action, I found myself very thirsty while held in one of the small hot cells. When I knocked on the door to ask for a glass of water (my constitutional right) I was told, “You lost your rights when you broke the law!” and denied the water. This incident highlights to me the mentality of absolute lack of acceptance of the validity of this form of protest, and the lack of respect of human rights by those who�s job it is to protect them. (The police.)

We suffer from an obsession with the ‘sacred’ nature of the law, which denies us the right to challenge laws, ask who they are there to protect, and allow society to change and grow as it has historically by the use of these methods.

Having examined some of the main human rights let us now turn to the fundamental values and building blocks of democracy, the pride of Iceland�s history as the first truly democratic nation. Democracy is based on; participation (of people in the system), representation (of the people by politicians) and accountability (of decisions taken to the people). By examining these elements I will present the idea that real democracy has been replaced by an ‘illusion of democracy’, manufactured by PR experts and spin-doctors who now hold such an important place in the workings of our governments. In fact many western governments (including Iceland) rely on this illusion to maintain a fairly silent and disinterested population, who don’t question a so-called democratic system which benefits big business and capital growth at the expense of all else (the environment, civil liberties etc).The use of rhetoric has confused the ‘free-market’ with the freedom of the people, suggesting that an open economic environment means an open society, and disguising the loss of civil liberties and democracy that march hand in hand with such unchecked and unquestioned capital growth.

First let us examine participation. In this the democratic systems we use are fundamentally flawed. In the 2003 Icelandic elections 33.7% voted Independence party, 31% voted for the Alliance (social democrats), and 17% voted Progressive. In the following coalition, not only did just 34% vote for the winning party, but a party with only 17% support achieved huge shared power in government. This was the coalition who went on to repeatedly deny requests for an open vote on Kárahnjukarvirkjun.

Secondly we may examine representation and accountability. Once elected it seems that ministers have a clean bill to do what they (and their interest groups) want without any accountability to, or representation of the people who put them there. In 2003 Prime Minister David Oddsson and Foreign Secretary Halldor Ásgrimsson, allied Iceland to the war in Iraq without the consultation of the people or even the government. This decision was vastly against public opinion. It was not representative and against the parliamentary rules and the constitution, which state that such issues must go through the foreign affairs commitee (which it did not). The Penal Code states that anyone who challenges the fairness of the Icelandic state as defined in the constitution is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Were they tried on this crime? No. Representation and accountability failed here as in so many cases.

Again, when the legal system and democracy has failed to hold the government accountable, protest is the only avenue for justice. In 2006 fifteen thousand people marched in towns and cities around Iceland in protest of the drowning of Kárahnjukar, to no effect. It is no wonder that people feel powerless with these methods of protest, and turn to direct action and civil disobedience to challenge decisions made in their name.

Some would even say that corporations have more power than people and even politicians in Iceland. Since we have seen the connection between money and power, it is clear that enormous monopolies like ALCOA, Baugur group, RioTinto and the KolKrabbin hold much. And how are they held accountable? DECODE, the owner of almost all Icelandic human DNA are selling off their information to other companies at 60,000 Kr a piece, with no public permission. Meanwhile ALCOA receives energy for many times less than the Icelandic public, an amount so small that Landsvirkjun will not even disclose it.

Again we ask: Representation for whom? At what cost? Democracy for whom? At what cost?

Modern Western democracies (such as Iceland and the UK) rely on a silent and disillusioned population, allowing the passing of controversial policies without check, as we are fooled by the rhetoric of democracy and freedom. Unlike under a harsh dictatorship or tough communism, we are too wealthy and content to question the system that creates our wealth.

On the issue of authority and acceptance, I always find the famous psychological test by Stanley Milgram very interesting. In this experiment a member of the public is asked to participate in a contrived experiment in which they must read out a list of questions to a second participant (actually an actor) sitting in the next room. When the answerer gets the questions wrong, they must give them an electric shock, the dose of which will increase with each wrong answer until it reaches a red (very dangerous) zone on the machine. The participant can hear the screams of the answerer getting louder and more horrific with each dose. In most experiments the participant complied to a very worrying level of electric dosage and did not question the authority of the white-coated, clipboard holding scientist directing the test. Milgram concluded that the perceived authority of the scientist removed the personal values of the participant to some extent.

He went on to examine how compliance changed with variations to certain aspects of the experiment. He found that compliance dropped dramatically when: a) the scientist did not wear a labcoat or hold a clipboard, b) A third party actor playing another member of the public entered and questioned the validity of the experiment. When related to democracy and societal values, the first instance shows the importance of perceived legitimacy in authority figures, and the need for the PR man to ensure the image keeps the people silent and satisfied. The second element I find most interesting as it shows the huge destabilising force of the dissenting public voice to the illusion of democracy. It only takes one other voice of concern to unmask the powers that be and lead to rejection of the system and re-establishment of personal values. No wonder governments try so hard to quash protest against their contentious policies.

Finally, when asking Icelanders what they consider the basic values of their society, the issue of Independence came up time and time again. It seems that if liberty is the fundamental value of the USA, Independence is that of Iceland. Icelanders are respected worldwide for their rejection of a national army, of the EU, of the globalisation of fishing rights. There is a real, and admirable feeling of the need to be self sufficient as an island state here, even at the cost of expensive fat-cat friendships in Europe and beyond.

Despite this, there is great willingness of the Icelandic nation to accept neo-colonisation of the economy by very few Aluminium corporations, who rip off energy at a fraction of the public cost, burdening the taxpayer and creating economic reliance on so few foreign companies. (ALCOA admitted in a meeting in Brazil that they are paying less than half for Icelandic power, as they will pay for big dam electricity there.) Yet, when foreign activists join Icelanders in opposing this sellout they are shunned and told, ‘it is not your business’.

So it seems that the freemarket, the economy and Iceland’s role in corporate globalisation are the key values of today’s Icelandic society. So we ask once more: Globalisation for whom? At what cost?

Does globalisation mean international free movement of people?
No, not in the case of the Falun Gong, or saving iceland activists repeatedly threatened with deportation.

Does it mean equal respect for all human lives?
Not in the case of the secretive treatment of workers at Karahnjukarvirkjun.

Does it mean meaningful international treatise on climate change, racial discrimination or nuclear weapons?
No, again it doesn’t. Geir H. Harde is even currently trying to weedle his way out of Iceland’s already excessive Kyoto allowances.

And, if these are the values of Iceland, are they really the values of the Icelandic people? Or just those of the powerful few at the head of the decision making process? And if they are not the people’s values, how will the people object to them? How will they regain and redefine the real fundamental values of society? That is the question which faces Iceland and most states today. In a climate where the market God has become almost unquestioned as the basis of our life and values, we must decide whether it is really ok to take the blue pill and settle into the cushioned comfort of the illusion, or gulp the red pill, open our eyes, and set ourselves to unmasking the powers that we must once again wrest our values from.

References:

Roy, Arundhati, 2005. ‘An ordinary persons guide to empire’. Penguin Books, India.

Miriam Rose is also co-author of:

Aluminium Tyrants (The Ecologist)
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Relevant stories:

The Directorate of Immigration Refuse to Deport Miriam Rose
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London Protest Against Iceland’s Deportation of Environmental Activists
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Stop Iceland’s Persecution of Environmental Activists – London Demo 2 October
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Saving Iceland Activists Threatened with Deportation
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UK Greens Urge Icelandic Government to Stop Persecution of SI Activists
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UK Greens Back British Environmental Activist Imprisoned in Iceland
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‘Surprise, surprise!’
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