Sections on today's Signs Page:
Signs Editorials
Editorial: All the world's a stage: Interview with Michael Frayn
Liz Else
NewScientist.com
23 September 2006
When Michael Frayn was a child, the other children nicknamed him "the scientist". He wasn't, of course. Just a bright little boy with glasses, who eventually became a successful novelist and playwright. In his writing he worries a lot about who we are, how we understand the world, and how subjectivity lies at the heart of everything - the tricky stuff that science and scientists also grapple with. His latest book, he tells Liz Else, attempts to deal with many of these issues head-on, asking, for example, what the universe would look like if humans didn't exist.
What will your theatre audiences make of you writing a book about human consciousness and the nature of the universe?
I don't want them to think anything. All writers write to tell their story. The Human Touch is a story. I wrote an earlier non-fiction book called Constructions in the 1970s and I went on thinking about our place in the universe and our relationship to it, the scale of everything. While it might be more sensible to keep my mouth shut, if you are a writer and you think about things you can't help but want to write about them.
Doesn't this bring you up against other popular science writers?
No, I am in no sense claiming to be a scientist or a science writer. But it seems that science is so fundamental to the world that even if you aren't a scientist you really have to try to think about it. I hope that I am trying to make just a bit clearer how we fit in with the world. After all, that is what most literature is about. It seems we all face a fundamental paradox in that it's impossible to think about the universe except in terms of its relation to humans. You can't make sense of language, or even scientific laws or mathematics, without the concept of an observer, and yet at the same time we know perfectly well that humans are a very late addition: the universe was here long before us and will be here long after us.
Have you always been interested in science?
No. As a child, I wanted to be a writer. I did want to be a research chemist when I was about seven because I assumed that it was about making explosives. There was a gang at school led by a tremendously ferocious girl, and I was appointed gang scientist because I wore spectacles - and obviously if you wore spectacles you had to be a gang scientist.
My job was to make explosives for the gang but the only materials I could find were chalk and elderberries. I never discovered a way of making a combination of the two explode.
Yet you ended up with lots of friends who were passionate about science.
In my military service days I met Eric Korn, who went on to become a zoologist first and ended up as a scientific bookseller. He had been part of a set at St Paul's School in London. They had a science teacher who had inspired them, and I acquired a little of that passion second-hand. I think it was the first time that I began to see science not as the dull subject people did at school but as another world. A "palace of thought" is how I describe it in the book. It was through Korn that I first heard about uncertainty, quantum mechanics and relativity.
What did scientists make of Copenhagen, your 1998 play about two physicists during the second world war?
Copenhagen builds on the famous meeting between Werner Heisenberg, a leading player in Germany's atomic energy and weapons programme, and his long-time friend the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, where they fell out. You need a lot of physics to tell the story and though I did a great deal of research and got a lot of help from scientists, when the play went on there were a lot of scientific mistakes.
Such as?
Awful, awful, some so embarrassing. For example, I talked about atoms of water vapour. I got many letters from scientists pointing out these errors, not at all with the savagery with which people in the arts deal with each other, just saying gently that perhaps if you look at this line again you might think that molecules of water vapour might be rather better. I got all those corrections incorporated in the play, though I am sure there are other things waiting to be found. I was very much struck by the gentleness with which I was treated. In the end, though, the play is not about physics, it's about how difficult it is to know why people do what they do, to know why we ourselves do what we do.
Have there been any interesting developments in the Bohr-Heisenberg story since Copenhagen came out?
Yes, the Bohr family recently released the draft of a letter Bohr wrote to Heisenberg after their meeting but never sent. The most striking thing about it is his acknowledgement that Heisenberg told him about an atomic weapons research programme in Germany and that he, Heisenberg, was running it. This is absolutely astonishing: Heisenberg was running the most secret research in Nazi Germany. He must have realised that Bohr would attempt to pass on this information, which he did. I think that goes some way to supporting Heisenberg's version of the story. Also, the Heisenberg family has set up a website where you will find a previously unknown letter which Heisenberg wrote to his wife during the week he was in Copenhagen meeting Bohr in September 1941.
Does it mention the conversation with Bohr that is central to your play?
Disappointingly it doesn't, probably because he expected the letter to be opened by the Gestapo, which is also probably why he posted it in Berlin. The letter makes it clear that the one thing we thought we knew - that whatever was said that evening wrecked the two men's friendship - is not true. It didn't wreck their friendship, not at once. Heisenberg spent another agreeable, convivial evening at the Bohr house, even after the conversation. It was probably only as they looked back that they began to think differently.
Are there any scientific stories of our age that you would like to turn into a play?
No, though I do think that we are in the middle of one of those "explosion" times where we are raising fascinating epistemological questions, such as those posed by superstring theory or cosmology. I hope a few more ideas strike and I will do my best to follow them through.
From issue 2570 of New Scientist magazine, 23 September 2006, page 50-51
After reading moral philosophy at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s, Michael Frayn went on to become a journalist. He has combined this with writing successful novels (such as The Tin Men and Spies) and plays (from farces and comedies such as Noises Off to the overtly serious Copenhagen). He also became a leading translator of Chekhov. His new book is The Human Touch: Our part in the creation of a universe (Faber & Faber).
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: Take your torture and go, George
by Don Williams
George Bush 43, Commander-in-Chief, Decider, Your Royal Highness, however you'd like to be addressed....
For God's sake, take your torture program and go. Take your secret prisons, your attack dogs, your electrodes, your water boards, your feeding tubes, your ceiling restraints, your whipping wires, your excruciating music, your sleep deprivation, your hobbles and cuffs. Take all such instruments and go.
They're making things much worse, as I will show you.
I saw you on CNN, Sept. 15, and you said that unless Congress "clarifies" Article 3 of the Geneva Accords, "the program is not going forward." You sounded like a spoilt child threatening to take his ball and go home. But you weren't talking about a little ball, you were talking about torture, though you wouldn't call it that.
So, if you're that oblivious to how the majority of us feel about torture and the Geneva Accords, then please, maybe it's time you took your "program" and went home to Texas. Heaven curse the day you ever decided to leave there.
As Colin Powell suggested in his recent letter to John McCain, your undermining of the Geneva Accords threatens to take away whatever moral high ground our nation has attained. It's demoralizing our troops and further dividing the country.
Worse yet, it's ineffective. Tell me what your "program" has done for us? You claim it shut down another attack on the homeland. Can you provide a shred of hard evidence? I can name a dozen things you got precisely WRONG-and in a very loud and petulant voice-leading up to the war in Iraq.
One of them is especially pertinent, because it was based on torture. Over and over you suggested Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots, and in February of 2003, you sent Powell over to the UN to make that claim to the world. Turns out the information he cited was based on lies told by a man undergoing torture.
I can show you where Newsweek, the New York Times, the New Yorker and others have shown that Powell unwittingly based his claim on lies told by one Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi.
Al-Libi, a man with serious mental problems, told his interrogators in Egypt-where he'd been sent by the CIA--that Saddam Hussein was teaching al-Qaeda how to make chemical and biological weapons. Powell didn't refer to al-Libi by name, rather he called him "a senior terrorist operative," according to the New Yorker. Later, al-Libi recanted and said he'd made such false statements in order to end the torture. Unfortunately, by then it was too late.
More than 100,000 people have likely died as a result of that bad information.
That's how torture works. Bad information begets bad action. Ask Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian engineer who was mistakenly put on a watch list in Canada. Snagged at a U.S. airport in 2002, Arar was secretly flown to Syria, where he was beaten with wires and chains and forced to live in a tiny underground grave, as he called it, unable to communicate with the family he'd left behind. He was released without charges one year later thanks to pressure from the Canadian government.
So yes, George, Your Highness, please, take your torture and go. It isn't working. While you're at it, take your signing statements and all the cute titles for programs that mean the opposite of what you name them, and give us back our Constitution and our country.
Try not to nuke anybody on your way out, as Seymour Hersh and several other reporters believe you're itching to do. Just take your phosphorous, your depleted uranium, your cluster bombs, your secret labs and everything else you've unleashed contrary to international law, and go away. If not now, then soon. At least say you'll go quietly come 2009 and not try slipping back into power, as some suggest you'll do, heaven help us, through one of the loopholes you've blasted in the Constitution.
Try to understand that, while some of us who loudly complain against you don't hate you, as our critics charge, we're heartsick and angry at what you're doing to our country, its reputation, its once-generous soul, its capacity for optimism, joy, empathy and rational debate. We're heartsick at what you're doing to our beautiful blue-green world. So please, take your talking points, your Karl Rove, your Condoleezza Rice, your hunting buddy Dick Cheney, your Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz and secretary of offense Donald Rumsfeld. Take all the wolves you placed in charge of all the henhouses-at Treasury, Interior, FCC, Education, Labor, FDA, NRC.
And then please let someone, anyone-maybe your father-take you by the hand and lead you away, to a very safe place.
http://www.mach2.com/williams/
Don Williams is a prize-winning columnist for the Knoxville News-Sentinel and the founding editor and publisher of New Millennium Writings, an annual anthology of literary writing. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Michigan Journalism Fellowship, a Golden Presscard Award and the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize. He is finishing a novel, RED STATE BLUES, set in his native Tennessee and Iraq. His book of selected journalism, ?Heroes, Sheroes and Zeroes, the Best Writings About People? by Don Williams, is now available for ordering. For more information, email him at donwilliams7@charter.net. Or visit the NMW website at www.mach2.com/williams/.
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: A Controlled Media? See For Yourself
MSNBC
26/09/2006
Ever wondered just why it is that Americans seem so intellectually challenged when it comes to knowledge of the world outside America and the truth about their political leaders? You've heard the claim that the US media is "government-controlled", but is it true?
Newsweek, courtesy of an advertisement on the MSNBC website, makes the case clear:
Original
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: Journalism, Wall Street Journal-Style
by Stephen Lendman
It takes great courage to venture onto the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal - especially on Fridays when Mary Anastasia O'Grady's Americas column appears. This is a woman who surely will have a serious back problem one day resulting from her permanent position of genuflection to the most extreme far-right she pledges allegiance to. In her assigned role at the Journal, which includes character assassination, she can best can be characterized as one of the "devil's" disciples - to borrow a word so aptly used by a well-known "courageous man" in recent days. She proved it in her September 22 column titled In Chavez's Crosshairs (the "courageous man" in question), and in it she outdid herself in her level of vitriol that was enough to punish all the senses of those able to get through it.
The column drips with hate and is filled with the most outrageous lies and hostility from the opening words to the last ugly pronouncement. This editorial writer begins by telling readers that "Fidel Castro is not far from death" which I'm sure will come as a surprise both to the Cuban leader and his doctors who seem to be indicating that Fidel is slowly recuperating from his major surgery which is quite normal for someone aged 80. She cites as her evidence "Hugo Chavez's performance at the United Nations" which she claims was a "revolutionary" baton-passing to the "kook from Caracas, Castro's wealthiest and keenest protege." O'Grady apparently didn't bother checking that the Venezuelan President's salary at about $24,000 is barely above the poverty level for a US family of four according to the US Census Bureau. Compare that to George Bush (responsible for Mary's future back problem) who's extremely wealthy and earns an annual salary of $400,000 plus all the luxury perks that go with his office that Hugo Chavez Frias doesn't have or even want.
But this was just for openers. O'Grady then begins another diatribe against the man who's become her favorite target. She begins by making her only notable truthful statement describing the Venezuela leader as the "scariest speaker at the General Assembly." She's right, of course, because today we live in an age where the truth Chavez speaks has become a radical or even a subversive act. It would never cross this hateful woman's mind that Hugo Chavez is one of the few world leaders willing to admit publicly what all the others know is true. For this he's condemned in the corporate-run media and especially in columns of right wing flacks like Mary O'Grady who have no credibility or even enough knowledge of the region she reports on in her writing. It shows in what she has to say.
It helps to understand where this woman is coming from if we note where she was formerly employed. She one time worked as an options strategist for Advest, Inc., Thomson McKinnon Securities, and Merrill Lynch & Co. She also once held a position at the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank that never met a corporate-friendly policy or US-led war it didn't support. In addition, as a journalist, she was awarded the Inter-American Press Association's (IAPA association of private media corporations) Daily Gleaner Award for editorial commentary and received an honorable mention in IAPA's opinion award category for 1999. With this kind of background, there's nothing surprising about O'Grady's ideology and why her writing is hopelessly biased and one-sided in favor of the Bush Administration's neoliberal Washington Consensus model now waging a "long war" against the world for total dominance and greater profits for the corporate predators benefitting from it - all at the expense of people needs being ignored.
O'Grady has lots more to say in this week's column and quickly gets into the meat it - that Venezuela represents a "pressing threat" (where) "The battleground is Bolivia, which Mr. Chavez badly wants to control so he can seize that country's natural-gas reserves and become the sole energy supplier in the Southern Cone." She goes on with the delusional notion that Chavez hopes to "seriously damage the Brazilian economy and crush Brazil's geopolitical ambitions as the leader in South America. In its place he wants to plant the flag of Venezuelan hegemony. If he gets away with it, Argentine and Chilean sovereignty would also be diminished and continental stability lost." She has lots more to say, but already she's left the reader breathless and needing to pause before going further.
If O'Grady stuck to the facts instead of specializing in her brand of poisoned rhetoric, she would know Hugo Chavez is a positive force in the region and beyond and has been a unifier, not a divider or exploiter. He's pursued his own Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) progressive alternative to the corrupted neoliberal WTO/IMF/World Bank model O'Grady champions. It's a comprehensive plan for Latin American integration aiming to develop "the social state" benefitting everyone, not just the privileged elite O'Grady swears allegiance to. It's based on the principles of complementarity, solidarity and cooperation among nations - just the opposite of the exploitive practices O'Grady likes to think work best. She's right if she means for the corporate giants that can only grow and prosper at the expense of ordinary people everywhere. Hugo Chavez has a different vision. Instead of trying to subjugate Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina, Venezuela has joined with these nations in the Southern Common Market customs union known as Mercosur. In doing so, Chavez expressed hope that this trade block would "prioritize social concerns (ahead of) the old elitist corporate model" that puts profits ahead of people needs. These are the facts Mary O'Grady ignores as reporting them would expose all the other lies she's written for years. It would also likely get her fired for not sticking to the party line she's paid to do.
Her article continues by referring to the opposition in Venezuela as "democrats," recounting her distorted version of how they tried to remove Chavez in their 2004 recall referendum (aka US-directed coup by other means) and failed. Chavez blew the opposition away with about 58% of the vote in an election judged free, open and fair but which O'Grady characterized as "clocked in state secrets" - no doubt because the wrong candidate won convincingly. She claimed exit polls showed Chavez was "badly beaten" but the "chavista-stacked electoral council declared him the winner." She fails to identify what exit polls she's referring to or who conducted them. The reader can only conclude they're either ones she dreamed up for this column or they were fraudulent ones conducted by the oligarchs in the country that have everything to gain if Chavez is ousted by any means.
This woman doesn't know when to quit. She then contends "Mr. Chavez boasts he was democratically elected and foments hatred against his neighbors, including the US (and) the non-aligned movement (intends) on going nuclear." She doesn't explain she's referring to Iran, a country that's a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), is in full compliance with it, and has every legal right to develop its commercial nuclear industry which is all it's doing according to all available evidence. She then again stresses that chavistas are putting a "blitz" on Bolivia "to make that country a (hydro) carbon copy of Venezuela."
Next, however, comes her best shot and one of her least accurate. She makes the audacious claim that Evo Morales (her other favorite target) "rose to executive power by first using violence to bring down two constitutional presidents and then forcing a new election, which he won." She doesn't explain that Juan Evo Morales Ayma (known as Evo) was a leader of Bolivia's cocalero movement or loose federation of coca leaf-growing campesinos. He's also the leader of his Movement for Socialism Party (MAS which means more). In both capacities he's been a champion of progressive change in his country and organized peaceful protests in 2005 in the capitol La Paz that forced the resignation of President Carlos Mesa who served the interests of capital and ignored the needs of his people. This is what O'Grady calls violence - courageous resistance to repression and intolerance. Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia in December, 2005 in an election controlled by the opposition because the people were so fed up with business as usual they defied all expectations turning out in large numbers to convincingly elect the only man they would entrust to rule their country.
Morales isn't O'Grady's kind of president because he wants to serve all his people and not just the elite few who've always had things in Bolivia their way. So she says "He dreams of an indigenous, collectivist Bolivarian economy under the thumb of an authoritarian government" while falsely claiming most Bolivians are "entrepreneurial." She may be right if she leaves out the indigenous majority (about 70% of the population) most of whom are poor and always had been disenfranchised until now. She accuses Morales of being "coached" by Hugo Chavez who's helping him institute progressive policies and programs which O'Grady rails against - because they're people-friendly and bad for the corporate interests she represents. She stresses Bolivia under Morales "could use some help from the international community....to weaken Evo." But she ends her weekly hate-column by coming back to her favorite target and public enemy number one in her eyes - Hugo Chavez - by trumpeting the notion that it's "clear....doing nothing while Mr. Chavez seizes power on the continent is not an option." It has all the sound of a call to arms to remove President Chavez by force or any other means despite the fact that he's the leading democrat in the hemisphere and beloved by the great majority of his people who will never tolerate a return to the ugly past of rule by the repressive oligarchs they'll never again accept.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogsspot.com.
Comment on this Editorial
Science and Environment
Hurricane Katrina's waves felt in California
New Scientist Print Edition
24 September 2006
On 29 August 2005, as hurricane Katrina was rumbling towards New Orleans, a seismic hum more than 1000 times the strength of the average volcanic tremor was felt nearly 3000 kilometres away in southern California. Its source was the hurricane itself.
Hurricanes create large ocean waves, which send energy pulsing through the Earth as they pound the shoreline. To determine the power of Katrina's seismic waves, Peter Gerstoft of the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues analysed the signals recorded by a network of 150 seismic stations in southern California just before Katrina hit the Louisiana coast. They used a method known as beamforming, which preferentially picks up signals from a particular direction, to decipher the seismicity generated by Katrina (Geophysical Research Letters, vol 33, p L17805).
Seismic surface waves, which travel through the Earth's crust, were detected 30 hours before the hurricane made landfall, while body waves, which bounce down into the mantle, arrived some 18 hours later. "The body waves had travelled down to 1100 kilometres inside the Earth," Gerstoft says. This is the first time that a hurricane's seismic signal has been detected so far away.
Comment on this Article
Fuels gold: Big risks of the biofuel revolution
Fred Pearce
New Scientist Print Edition
25 September 2006
The gold rush has begun. Ditch oil and buy corn - as much as you can. It's a sure-fire investment. At least that's the message you might have picked up from the headlines in recent months. Soon, we're told, corn crops will be as valuable as black gold. Not because tortilla chips are the next big diet fad, but because corn and a handful of other crops are being hyped as the fuel sources of the future.
There are many reasons for this sudden excitement surrounding "biofuels" (see "Biofuel basics", beneath this article, for a look at exactly what this covers). Not only have soaring oil prices made biofuels economically viable for the first time in years, but they could also help countries reduce their dependency on fossil fuel imports. However, the real PR coup for biofuels is their eco-friendly image.
Supporters claim they will dramatically slash our net greenhouse gas inputs, because the crops soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow. Given this, it's no surprise politicians and environmentalists the world over are backing the idea, hoping we will all soon be using this green alternative to power our cars, buses and trains. Even former oilman President George W. Bush is behind them. In his State of the Union address on 31 January, he called for a national drive to run vehicles on biofuels.
But before you join in the celebrations, all is not as it seems. Scientists have begun to question the environmental and social arguments for bioethanol and biodiesel (see "Biodiesel backlash"), casting serious doubts on whether either can meet such high hopes. And environmentalists find themselves in a particularly excruciating quandary, with half the green community embracing biofuels to the last corn kernel, and the other half desperate to slam on the brakes.
Far from solving our problems, say the dissenters, biofuels will trash rainforests, suck water reserves dry, kill off species and raise food prices. They will also accelerate the corporate takeover of agriculture, create famines and could leave fuel importers as dependent as ever on other countries. Worst of all, many biofuels will barely slow global warming at all if the technology behind them does not improve. The biofuels supporters counter that it's still early days, and we should give this technology the time and investment to deliver on its promise. So who's right?
The controversy may be brand new, but biofuels themselves are an old idea. The Model T Ford, first produced in 1908, was designed to run on ethanol, and Rudolf Diesel, who invented the diesel engine in 1892, ran his demonstration model on peanut oil. Biofuels fell out of favour as petroleum-based fuels appeared and became cheaper to produce, but after the oil crisis of the early 1970s, some countries returned to biofuels. For example, Brazil has been producing large quantities of ethanol from sugar cane for over 30 years, and last year produced about half of the world's bioethanol (see Graphic). Brazilian law now requires that 20 per cent of fuel at the pumps be blended with bioethanol, which all gasoline-powered cars can tolerate. Over 15 per cent of Brazil's cars can even run on pure bioethanol.
According to a study published in June by the Worldwatch Institute, for Brazil to produce 10 per cent of its entire fuel consumption requires just 3 per cent of its agricultural land, so it's not surprising other places want to emulate Brazil's approach. The problem is that in most other countries, the numbers don't add up.
The same Worldwatch study estimated that to meet that 10 per cent target, the US would require 30 per cent of its agricultural land, and Europe a staggering 72 per cent. It's no secret why things stack up so differently. Not only do Brazilians drive far less than Europeans and Americans, their fertile land and favourable climate mean their crop yields are higher, and their population density is lower.
The US and Europe aren't the only ones hoping the Brazilian model will be a quick fix for environmental and fuel-security woes. China plans to cut oil imports and CO2 emissions by running its cars on ethanol made from cassava, while Cuba hopes to revitalise its moribund sugar industry by turning the crop into ethanol, and Hungary wants to replace Russian energy imports with corn-based ethanol.
What few yet appreciate is that biofuels are not all made equal. In the US, the immediate plan is to ramp up production of corn bioethanol. America's 100th corn-to-ethanol distillery came online in May, and a further 30 are under construction across the Midwest. Bioethanol production is forecast to almost double between 2005 and 2007, by which time the bioethanol business will be consuming around a fifth of the US corn crop. But when you try to assess the environmental benefits of bioethanol, things are not clear-cut. It takes a lot of energy both to grow corn and to convert it to ethanol, and cultivating a crop demands large quantities of fertiliser and pesticides, which themselves have environmental and energy costs. So is it actually worth it?
Several research groups have tried to take all this into account and compare fossil fuel emissions with those of corn bioethanol at every stage of production from seed to engine. The studies have been beset by scientific uncertainties, such as how much of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide is produced by the nitrogen fertiliser used in growing corn. Opinions are divided as to what should and should not be included in the calculation, which means the results vary widely, but one study by David Pimentel at Cornell University in New York concluded that corn ethanol creates more greenhouse gases than burning fossil fuels.
Others aren't so pessimistic. In a review of several studies published in Science in January, Alexander Farrell of the University of California, Berkeley, estimated bioethanol would produce 13 per cent less greenhouse emissions than an equivalent amount of gasoline. However, Farrell arrives at this more favourable figure by assuming the leftover biomass from making the bioethanol is used as a dry fuel in a furnace or fed to animals, and not all bioethanol refineries do this.
Another reason a growing number of people oppose biofuels is that growing corn for ethanol uses up land that is currently supplying food to the world. Americans won't go hungry if surplus US corn is converted to ethanol rather than exported, but the resulting slump in the global grain supply will precipitate a rise in prices, and many see that as unethical. According to Lester Brown, veteran commentator and activist on food politics, the corn required to fill an SUV tank with bioethanol just once could feed one person for a year. He describes the boom in bioethanol as a competition between the 800 million people in the world who own automobiles and the 3 billion people who live on less than $2 a day, many of whom are already spending over half their income on food.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the competition has already begun. The FAO says the conversion of corn to ethanol is a primary reason for a sharp decline in world grain stocks and a commensurate rise in grain prices in the first half of 2006. The trend was echoed in a report to investors by the bank Goldman Sachs in July, which predicted corn prices will rise further as biofuels grow. Eric Holthusen, a senior official with oil giant Shell, recently described using food crops to make fuel while people were starving as "morally inappropriate".
It is striking how much land will be needed for biofuels to make a significant contribution to fuel usage. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July, Jason Hill and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, St Paul, calculated that even if the US diverted its entire current corn harvest to biofuels it would meet only 11 per cent of its current gasoline demand. The Worldwatch Institute estimates that to produce 10 per cent of the world's transport fuels would require 9 per cent of the planet's agricultural land.
Promoters of biofuels say such calculations are misleading. They claim high prices stimulated by demand for biofuels will encourage both more intensive cultivation of corn and the spread of corn fields onto land that is now idle. Unfortunately, both scenarios would undermine the already slender climate benefits of corn-based ethanol. More intensive growing means more chemical inputs, increasing the energy consumption and greenhouse emissions per tonne of corn. And Hill points out that clearing and ploughing virgin land will also release more CO2, quite possibly resulting in a net increase in greenhouse emissions from biofuel production.
So much for corn, but could other crops fare better? Lawrence Eagles at the International Energy Agency in Paris, France, says making ethanol from sugar cane is better for the environment than using corn because it avoids the first phase of the corn process - converting the plant starch into sugar. In terms of litres of fuel per hectare of crop, and net greenhouse gas benefit, sugar cane beats corn, says Eagles.
Some bioethanol producers have caught on to the idea. As a result, world sugar prices have doubled in the past 18 months, says Richard Oxley, head of industry consultancy Sugaronline. "All the major producers round the world - Brazil, India, Thailand, etc - are just rushing out and planting as much cane as they can," he says.
Trouble is, the high price is encouraging growers to clear land and plant sugar cane without regard for the ecological impact. Environmentalists fear that as demand for sugar cane rises on the global market, Brazilian farmers will push ever deeper into the Amazon rainforest, either to grow sugar cane itself or crops displaced by it.
As if that weren't enough, sugar cane plantations put huge pressure on water supplies - this is a thirsty crop. In countries without plentiful rainfall, farmers must draw water from rivers or underground reserves. So although irrigation isn't a problem in Brazil, other countries aren't so lucky. For example, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, farmers are scrambling to grow more cane to take advantage of the high prices, yet existing plantations already take two-thirds of the state's water and have lowered water tables by up to 50 metres in places.
Globally, no one is considering how much water biofuels will require, says Oxley. India is already drawing down its water reserves fast, and this will lead directly to dry wells, parched fields and empty granaries. While sugar cane may be a more greenhouse-friendly feedstock than corn for making ethanol, it is markedly worse in terms of its demands on the world's dwindling water reserves.
So are we utterly mistaken to think that bioethanol could usher in an era of greener energy? The way things are developing, it certainly looks that way, but it needn't be so.
The technology for producing biofuels is still in its infancy, and scientists working on it have grander things in mind. They want to perfect a way to make biofuels from non-food crops and waste biomass, saving the corn and other fuel crops for food use, and to do it without wrecking natural ecosystems. Given time, they think they can achieve this.
Already researchers are discovering clever ways to produce bioethanol without using food crops, and focusing instead on converting cellulose-rich organic matter into ethanol. Cellulose is the main structural component of all green plants. Its molecules comprise long chains of sugars strong enough to make plant cell walls. If you could break down those molecules to release the sugars they contain, you could ferment them into ethanol.
Developing an efficient process to convert cellulose into ethanol could open the door to many non-food materials such as switchgrass - a wild grass that thrives in the eastern states and Midwest of the US - straw, crop residues like stalks and hardwood chips. Its supporters say cellulose feedstocks could deliver twice as much ethanol per hectare as corn, and do it using land that is today neither economically productive nor environmentally precious. Some think municipal waste such as paper, cardboard and waste food could even be used as a feedstock.
A road map to making ethanol from cellulose set out in June by the US Department of Energy estimated the US could produce a third of its fuel needs in this way by 2030. It recommends genetically modifying crops such as switchgrass and poplar to make hardy, pest-resistant varieties that are very high in cellulose. This would mean low-maintenance feedstock, dramatically cutting energy and chemical inputs compared with existing feedstocks. The catch is that it would also require much more efficient enzymes to break the cellulose down into sugars, and better varieties of yeasts that ferment the sugars into ethanol faster and more efficiently than existing strains. "We can engineer crops to grow on dry and saline soil. This is going to be a revolution. For agriculture it is going to be a very exciting time," says Raymond Orbach, Under Secretary for Science at the DoE.
But so far most companies have been hesitant about investing in the research necessary to tackle these problems. So the DoE is setting up two new research centres, into which it will plough $250 million over the next five years, with the aim of developing the next generation of biofuel feedstocks. "It's too risky for the private sector. That's why government is doing this," says Orbach.
But one Canadian company is already on the case. Iogen, based in Ottawa, has built a pilot plant that has been producing cellulose ethanol in small quantities for the last two years. It uses a tropical fungus genetically modified to produce enzymes that break down cellulose, and can "digest" all sorts of biomass.
ogen recently attracted investment of $30 million from Goldman Sachs, and in January it announced it would investigate the feasibility of building a full-scale commercial plant in Germany in partnership with Volkswagen and Shell. If the numbers add up, Iogen could kick-start the revolution that may yet deliver us from our dependence on oil, without costing the Earth in the process.
From issue 2570 of New Scientist magazine, 25 September 2006, page 36-41
Comment on this Article
Do the laws of nature last forever?
Lee Smolin
New Scientist Print Edition
21 September 2006
In science we aim for a picture of nature as it really is, unencumbered by any philosophical or theological prejudice. Some see the search for scientific truth as a search for an unchanging reality behind the ever-changing spectacle we observe with our senses. The ultimate prize in that search would be to grasp a law of nature - a part of a transcendent reality that governs all change, but itself never changes.
The idea of eternally true laws of nature is a beautiful vision, but is it really an escape from philosophy and theology? For, as philosophers have argued, we can test the predictions of a law of nature and see if they are verified or contradicted, but we can never prove a law must always be true. So if we believe a law of nature is eternally true, we are believing in something that logic and evidence cannot establish.
Of course, laws of nature are very useful, and we have in fact been able to discover good candidates for them. But to believe a law is useful and reliable is not the same thing as to believe it is eternally true. We could just as easily believe there is nothing but an infinite succession of approximate laws. Or that laws are generalisations about nature that are not unchanging, but change so slowly that until now we have imagined them as eternal.
These are disturbing thoughts for a theoretical physicist like myself. I chose to go into science because the search for eternal, transcendent laws of nature seemed a lofty goal. However, the possibility that laws evolve in time is one that recent developments in theoretical and experimental physics have forced me, and others, to consider.
The biggest reason to consider that the laws of nature might evolve is the discovery that the universe itself is evolving. When we believed that the universe was eternal it made more sense to believe that the laws that governed it were also eternal. But the evidence we have now is that the universe - or at least the part of it we observe - has been around for only a few billion years.
We know that the universe has been expanding for about 14 billion years and that as we go back in time it gets hotter and denser. We have good evidence that there was a moment when the cosmos was as hot as the centre of a star. If we use the laws that we know apply to space-time and matter today, we can deduce that a few minutes earlier the universe must have been infinitely dense and hot. Many cosmologists take this moment as the birth of the universe and indeed as the birth of space and time. Before this big bang there was nothing, not even time.
Why these laws?
So what could it mean to say that a universe only 14 billion years old is governed by laws that are eternally true? What were the laws doing before time and space? How did the universe know, at that moment of beginning, what laws to follow?
Perhaps the solution to this is that the big bang was not the first instant of time. However, this raises a new question, which has been championed by the great theoretical physicist John Wheeler. Even if we believe the universe evolved from something that existed before the big bang, we have no reason to believe the laws of that previous universe were the same as those we observe in our universe. Might the laws have changed when our universe, or region of the universe, was created?
This question came to the fore in 1973, when physicists first developed a theory of elementary particle physics called the standard model. This theory has successfully accounted for every experiment in particle physics before and since that time, apart from those that involve gravity. It only required a small modification to incorporate the later discovery that neutrinos have mass. As for gravity, all experiments support the general theory of relativity, which Einstein published in 1915. There may be further laws to discover, to do with the unification of gravity with quantum theory and with the other forces of nature. But in a certain sense, we have for the first time in history a set of laws sufficient to explain the result of every experiment that has ever been done.
As a result, in the past three decades the attention of physicists has shifted from seeking to know the laws of nature to a new question: why these laws? Why do these laws, and not others, hold in our universe?
Confronting this question while working on string theory in the 1980s, a few of us began to wonder whether the laws might have changed at the big bang, just as Wheeler had suggested. It was obvious that we could make a connection to biology. I wondered whether there might be an evolutionary mechanism that would allow us to answer the question of "why these laws?" in the same way that biology answers questions like "why these species?". Perhaps the mechanism that makes laws evolve also picks out certain laws and makes them more probable than others. I found such a mechanism, modelled on natural selection, which I called cosmological natural selection.
This is possible because string theory is actually a collection of theories: it has a vast number of distinct versions, each of which gives rise to different collections of elementary particles and forces. We can think of the different versions of string theory as analogous to the different phases of water - ice, liquid and steam. When the universe is squeezed down to such tremendous densities and temperatures that the quantum properties of space-time become important, a phase transition can take place - like water turning to steam - leading from one version of the theory to another.
The many different phases of string theory can also be seen as analogous to a variety of species governed by different DNA sequences. They can be imagined as making up a vast space, which I called the "landscape", to bring out the analogy to a "fitness landscape" in biology that represents all possible ways genes can be arranged.
Cosmological natural selection makes a few predictions that could easily be falsified, and while it is too soon to claim strong evidence for it, those predictions have held up (New Scientist, 24 May 1997, p 38). At the very least, it opened my eyes to the possibility that a theory in which the laws changed in time could still make testable predictions.
It turns out that I had been beaten to the punch: some philosophers had confronted these issues over a century ago. In 1891 the philosopher Charles Pierce wrote that it was hardly justifiable to suppose that universal laws of nature have no reason for their special form. "The only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution," he added.
Pierce went much further than I have done, asserting that the question "Why these laws?" has to be answered by a cosmological scenario analogous to evolution. But was he right?
Let us start with an obvious objection: if laws evolve, what governs how they evolve? Does there not have to be some deeper law that guides the evolution of the laws? For example, when water turns into ice, more general laws continue to hold and govern how this phase transition happens - the laws of atomic physics. So perhaps, even if a law turns out to evolve in time, there is always a deeper, unchanging law behind that evolution.
Shapes of things to come
Another example concerns the geometry of space. We used to think that space always followed the perfectly flat Euclidean geometry that we all learn in high school. This was considered one of the laws of nature, but Einstein's general theory of relativity asserts that this is wrong. The geometry of space can be anything it wants to be: any of an infinite number of curved geometries is possible. So what picks out the geometry we see?
General relativity asserts that the geometry of space evolves in the course of time according to some deeper law. Today's geometry is what it is because it evolved from a different geometry in the past, following that definite law.
However, there is a big problem with this kind of explanation, which has to do with the fact that the laws that govern the evolution of geometry are deterministic. They share this feature with most laws studied in physics, including Newton's laws and quantum mechanics. Consider Newton's law of motion for an object. If we know where the object is now and how it is moving, and we know the laws that govern the forces it encounters, we can predict where it will be and has been for all time, past as well as future. General relativity is the same. If we know the geometry of space at a particular time, and how it is changing, we can predict the whole history of space-time. To apply these deterministic laws, however, we have to give a description of the system at one point in time. This is called the initial condition. If we do not specify an initial condition, the laws cannot describe anything.
This is why Einstein's equations do not fully explain why the geometry of space is what it is. They require an initial condition -the geometry at an earlier time. This brings us back to the dilemma about the big bang. Either the universe had no beginning, in which case the chain of causes goes further into the past, before the big bang; or the big bang was the beginning, and we require some explanation as to why it started and with what geometry.
So we have arrived at a conundrum. It appears that if laws evolve, other laws are required to guide their evolution. But then, the evolution of a law is just like the evolution of any other system under a deterministic law. We cannot explain why something is true in the present without knowing its initial state. Applied to laws, this means we cannot explain what the laws are now if we do not specify what the laws were in the past. So the idea of laws evolving by following a deeper rule does not seem to lead to an explanation of "why these laws?".
To avoid this we need an evolutionary mechanism that will allow us to deduce features of the present without having to know the past in detail. This is where Pierce's statement, which appears to invoke biological evolution, comes into its own.
In biology, many features of living organisms can be explained by natural selection, even if one doesn't know details about the past. As the process is partly random, we cannot predict exactly what mix of species will evolve in a given ecosystem, but we can predict that the species that survive will be fitter than those that don't. This is, I believe, why Pierce insisted that any explanation of "why these laws?" involves evolution. And using this kind of logic, cosmological natural selection makes some predictions without detailed information about previous stages of the universe.
But even this is unsatisfactory: it doesn't address the question of how a law that guides the evolution of matter in time could also change in time. For that, we have to examine the way we think about time.
There are big problems with time, even before we start thinking about the evolution of laws of nature. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of quantum gravity, which attempts to pull quantum theory and general relativity together into one consistent framework. This is because the two theories each use a different notion of time. In quantum theory, time is defined by a clock sitting outside the system being modelled. In general relativity, time is measured by a clock that is part of the universe that the theory describes. Many of the successes and failures of different approaches to quantum gravity rest on how they reconcile this conflict between time as an external parameter versus time as a physical property of the universe.
However these questions are eventually resolved, there are still deeper issues with time. These arise in any theory in which the laws are taken as being eternal. To illustrate this, we can take a simple example, such as Newton's description of a system of particles. To formulate the theory we invent a mathematical space, consisting of all the positions that all the particles might have. Each point in the space is a possible configuration of the system of particles, so the whole space is called the configuration space. As the system evolves over time, it traces out a curve in configuration space called a history. The laws of physics then pick out which histories are possible and which are not.
The problem with this description is that time has disappeared. The system is represented not by its state at a moment of time but by a history taking it through all time. This description of reality seems timeless. What has disappeared from it is any sense of the present moment, which divides our experience of the flow of time into past, present and future. This problem became particularly acute when it emerged in Einstein's theory of general relativity. Solving the theory gives a four-dimensional space-time history and no indication of "now".
Some, looking at this picture, have been tempted to say that reality is the whole timeless history and that any sense we have of a present moment is some kind of illusion. Even if we don't believe this, the fact that one could believe it means that there is nothing in this description of nature that corresponds to our common-sense experience of past, present and future. This is called the problem of transience. The sense of the universe unfolding or becoming in time, of "now", has no representation in general relativity. But in truth the problem was always there in Newton's physics and it is there in any theory in which some part of nature is described by a state that evolves deterministically in time, governed by a law that dictates change, but never changes.
The illusion of now
The philosopher Roberto Unger of Harvard University calls this the "poisoned gift of mathematics to physics". Many believe that mathematics represents truth in terms of timeless relationships, based on logic. It allows us to formulate physical laws precisely: this is the gift. By doing so, however, mathematics represents paths in configuration space unfolding in time by logic, and this logic exists outside of time. The poison in the gift is the disappearance of any notion of the present or of becoming.
Physicists and their predecessors have been eliminating time like this since the days of Descartes and Galileo at least. But is it the wrong thing to do? Is there a way to represent change through time in a way that represents our sense of becoming, or of time unfolding?
I don't know the answer, but I suspect this question is connected to that of whether laws can evolve in time. One can only draw the curve representing a history in time by assuming that the laws which govern how the history evolves never change. Without a fixed, unchanging law, one could not draw the curve.
Here is the question that keeps me awake these days: is there a way to represent the laws of physics mathematically that retains the notions of the present moment and the continual unfolding of time? And would this allow us - or even require us - to formulate laws that also evolve in time?
Again, I don't know the answer, but I know of a few hints. One comes from theoretical biology. The configuration space for an evolutionary theorist is vast, consisting of all the possible sequences of DNA. At present, there is a particular collection representing all the species that exist. Evolution will produce new ones, while others will disappear. The interesting thing is that natural selection operates in such a way that biologists have little use for the entire configuration space. Instead, they need study only a much smaller space, which is those collections of genes that could be reached from the present one by a few evolutionary steps. The theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman of the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, calls this the "adjacent possible".
This scheme allows laws to change. Consider the laws that govern sexual selection. They do not make sense for any old biosphere, as they only come into play when there are creatures with two sexes. So in evolutionary theory there is no need for eternal laws, and it makes sense to speak of a law coming into existence at some time to govern possibilities that did not exist before. Furthermore, there is such a vast array of possible mechanisms of natural selection that it would not make any sense to list them all and treat them as timeless. Better to think of laws coming into existence as the new creatures that evolve in each step require.
Of course, one might reply that natural selection itself never changes. But natural selection is a fact of logic, not a contingent law of nature. Every real law in biology depends on some aspect of the creatures that exist at a given time, which means the laws are also time-bound.
It is not impossible to achieve time-bound laws in physics. There are logicians who have proposed alternative systems of logic that incorporate a notion of time unfolding. In these logics, what is true and false is assigned for a particular moment, not for all time. For a given moment some propositions are true, others false, but there remains an infinite list of propositions that are yet to become either true or false. Once a proposition is true or false, it remains so, but at each moment new propositions become decided. These are called intuitionalist logics and they underlie a branch of mathematics called topos theory.
Some of my colleagues have studied these logics as a model for physics. Fotini Markopoulou of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, has shown that aspects of space-time geometry can be described in terms of these logics. Chris Isham of Imperial College London and others propose to reformulate physics completely in terms of them.
It is interesting that some physicists now propose that the universe is some kind of computer, because similar questions are being asked in computer science. In the standard architecture all computers now use, invented by the mathematician John von Neumann, the operating system never changes. It governs the flow of information through a computer just as an eternal law of nature is thought to guide physics. But some visionary computer scientists such as Jaron Lanier wonder whether there could be other kinds of architectures and operating systems that themselves evolve in time.
Looking at biology, it seems there are advantages to what are, essentially, time-bound laws. Evolving laws might make computer systems similarly robust and less likely to do what the laws of natural selection, it seems, never do: crash. The universe, too, seems to function rather well, operating without glitches and fatal errors. Perhaps that's because natural selection is hard at work in the laws of nature.
From issue 2570 of New Scientist magazine, 21 September 2006, page 30-35
Comment on this Article
Arctic Ice the size of Texas melts in one year
New Scientist Print Edition
23 September 2006
MAY BE this is Earth's way of telling President George W. Bush that global warming cannot be ignored: in just one year, the perennial sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean has shrunk by nearly three-quarters of a million square kilometres, an area comparable to that of Bush's home state of Texas.
Perennial sea ice is the ice that survives at least one summer, and is usually more than 3 metres thick. Son Nghiem of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and his colleagues used NASA's QSCAT satellite to measure the changes in Arctic perennial ice from 2004 to 2005, by comparing ice cover averaged over November and December in each year, the team reports in Geophysical Research Letters (vol 33, p L17501).
They found that perennial ice cover decreased by 720,000 square kilometres - a 14 per cent drop in one year. This is a dramatic change compared with the 7.8 per cent reduction per decade that has been recorded since the 1970s.
The changes were not evenly spread. Perennial ice made some gains in the west Arctic Ocean, but nearly half was lost in the east. If the trend continues, it could open a vast ice-free region in the east Arctic Ocean, the team says.
From issue 2570 of New Scientist magazine, 23 September 2006, page 5
Comment on this Article
Snooze your way to high test scores
New Scientist Print Edition
23 September 2006
IF YOU are trying to commit something to memory, take a nap. Even a short daytime snooze could help you learn.
A good night's sleep is known to improve people's ability to learn actions such as mirror writing. REM sleep, when most dreaming occurs, is thought to be particularly important.
The role of sleep in factual learning has been less clear. Now Matthew Tucker at The City University of New York and his colleagues have shown that even a nap with no REM sleep can help.
Volunteers were told to memorise pairs of words (a test of factual learning) and to practise tracing images in a mirror (action learning). When they were tested straight afterwards and 6 hours later, those who had been allowed a nap of up to 1 hour before the re-test scored 15 per cent better in the factual test than the non-nappers, but no better in the action test (Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, vol 86, p 241).
"Traditionally, time devoted to daytime napping has been considered counterproductive," the researchers say. It now seems sleep is "an important mechanism for memory formation".
From issue 2570 of New Scientist magazine, 23 September 2006, page 17
Comment on this Article
Uncovering the hazards in our electronic gadgets
Duncan Graham-Rowe
New Scientist Print Edition
25 September 2006
Have you ever wondered what your computer is made of? You may not want to know. An analysis by Greenpeace of the chemicals contained in the components of five types of laptop computer revealed toxic flame-retardants and other harmful chemicals in some of them. In one of the computers, Greenpeace says it found harmful chemicals that the maker has publicly claimed to have eliminated from its products.
The findings highlight the challenges facing environmental regulators as they attempt to police the eradication of harmful chemicals from electronic goods. Failure by the regulators might not only put users at risk, but also mean chemicals might leach into groundwater beneath landfills, or contaminate people working in recycling plants where these machines end their lives.
Greenpeace found the toxic chemicals after analysing just a handful of the many hundreds of components inside each computer. Zeina Al-Hajj of Greenpeace says that the discovery of suspect chemicals in such a limited analysis of electronic goods reveals the magnitude of the task facing regulators as they work to enforce new rules on the use of many chemicals in goods, such as the European Union's Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive.
The laptop analysis was carried out at the Eurofins environmental testing lab in Galten, Denmark, and a Greenpeace lab at the University of Exeter, UK. The labs bought five new laptops made by Acer, Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Sony in March this year. The computers were then dismantled and analysed using various techniques, including X-ray spectroscopy to detect and quantify the presence of certain chemical elements in 40 components, including cooling fans, taken from each computer.
A selection of these samples were then submitted to combined gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to detect the presence of specific compounds. The analysts found that among the five computers, the Hewlett-Packard laptop had some of the highest levels (see Table) of a number of chemicals, including a substance called decabromodiphenyl ether (decaBDE), a flame retardant that the company claims to have removed from its product line some years ago.
Greenpeace stresses that its analysis is not a reflection on any of the manufacturers' entire product lines - and none of them has broken any law. However, the findings are at odds with information about Hewlett-Packard products that the company has placed on its website, which states: "HP eliminated the use of decaBDE many years ago and has no plans to reinitiate its use."
"That is quite shocking," says Jim Puckett of the UN's Basel Action Network in Seattle, Washington. The network monitors breaches of the Basel convention, which regulates the flow of hazardous waste from industrialised countries to developing nations. With the wide range of substitute chemicals available today, there ought to be alternative choices for manufacturers, he says.
"It's disappointing to see these results," says Zoe McMahon, HP's environmental manager for Europe. The company has not been deliberately misleading its customers, she says, and is taking the matter seriously. "Our policy hasn't changed. Several years ago we restricted a number of flame retardants," she says, including decaBDE. It's too early to say how this substance came to escape HP's testing procedures and end up in the laptop that was analysed but HP is working with its suppliers to investigate Greenpeace's findings, she says.
Apple Computer's MacBook laptop analysed by Greenpeace also contained a permitted flame-retardant, called TBBPA, at levels higher than in any of the other computers, says Kevin Brigden at the Greenpeace lab, who oversaw the testing. Apple Computer chose not to respond to Greenpeace's findings when asked for comment by New Scientist.
TBBPA, decaBDE and other brominated flame retardants (BFRs) were once used in many plastic components in electronic goods, but are now being phased out following concerns over their impact on human health and the environment. "Some BFRs persist in the environment and are able to bio-accumulate," Brigden says. Long-term exposure can interfere with brain development, or the endocrine system. One of the problems with these chemicals is that it is difficult to dispose of them through incineration without releasing highly toxic dioxins into the environment. Only the Sony laptop contained no BFRs (see Table).
Controversially, decaBDE is still permitted under the European Union's RoHS directive. It was originally banned but was reinstated after the makers objected to the EU, saying it was less hazardous than other BDEs. However, since commercial decaBDE contains about 3 per cent nonaBDE, which was banned when RoHS came into force on 1 July, the use of decaBDE will now in practice no longer be possible. None of the machines Greenpeace tested was breaking any law, however, because they were purchased in Europe before 1 July.
RoHS may be a European law, but its influence is being felt around the world. Even in the US, where (except in a few states) BFRs are not banned or regulated, the chemicals banned under RoHS are being phased out, Al-Hajj says.
Up to 50 million tonnes of waste electronic equipment is being dumped every year, so residual toxic chemicals are one of the fastest-growing environmental problems, says Michael Williams of the UN Environment Programme. Even with many such substances now banned, the problem of dealing with millions of tonnes of older equipment will remain.
Greenpeace wants all toxic chemicals removed from e-goods. Peter Guthrie at the Centre for Sustainable Development in Cambridge, UK, says that for this to happen it will be crucial to ensure that manufacturers have to take back their products at the end of their lives. Only then will they be more inclined to switch to safer new materials.
From issue 2570 of New Scientist magazine, 25 September 2006, page 26-27
The greener alternatives
For many of the harmful chemicals traditionally used in electronic equipment, there are now a number of safer alternatives, though as Greenpeace found, they are not used as often as they could be.
POLYVINYL CHLORIDE
PVC, a chlorinated plastic, was once used for insulating wiring. But both production of PVC and its eventual disposal can create persistent and highly toxic dioxins, which pose a major health hazard. Alternatives for PVC vary widely depending upon application, but a variety of non-chlorinated alkene-based plastics, such as polyethylene, can replace it in wiring insulation.
LEAD
Solder used to contain as much as 50 per cent lead, but lead-free solder made up of tin, silver, copper, bismuth and zinc is now widely available. These metals' toxicity and ability to accumulate in the body are far lower than for lead, whose highly toxic effects are the same regardless of whether it is inhaled or ingested. These include irreversible tissue damage, particularly to the developing brain and central nervous system, the kidneys and the reproductive system.
BROMINATED FLAME RETARDANTS
Incorporating BFRs into plastic components is intended to enhance safety by making the material less flammable, but BFRs are now known to be a health risk. They accumulate in biological tissue and have been found in human breast milk, too. Chronic exposure interferes with brain and skeletal development. Animal experiments suggest that this may lead to permanent neurological damage, impairing learning and memory. Other studies have shown that some BFRs can act as endocrine disruptors. The three main classes are polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), hexabromo-cyclododecane (HBDC) and brominated bisphenols, in particular tetrabromo-bisphenol-A (TBBPA). Alternatives for BFRs include non-toxic silicone-based flame retardants, for instance, which are recyclable many times over.
HEXAVALENT CHROMIUM
Also known as chromium (vi) or chromate, hexavalent chromium is used in electronics as a corrosion inhibitor. It is highly toxic and a known carcinogen. Replacements include the metal's far less reactive trivalent form or nickel-iron-cobalt alloys.
Comment on this Article
Minor earthquake awakens S.C. residents
AP
September 25, 2006
BLENHEIM, S.C. - A minor earthquake awakened residents early Monday in northeastern South Carolina, the second quake to hit the area in several days.
The magnitude 3.7 quake hit at 1:44 a.m. and was centered near Society Hill, about 90 miles southeast of Charlotte, N.C., according to the National Earthquake Information Center in Denver.
There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage. Roy Allison, director of emergency management for Marlboro County, said he and other residents were woken up by their shaking houses.
At a furniture and appliance store in Wallace, about 10 miles north of the epicenter, "the windows sounded like they were about to bust out," said Valerie Perhealth, daughter of the store's owner. "It scared me so bad."
A magnitude 3.5 quake shook the area Friday. The centers of the two quakes were about 10 miles apart.
Jessica Sigala, a geophysicist with the earthquake center, said the area gets small earthquakes now and then because of faults connected to the Appalachians.
"There's no fear of a bigger earthquake. These (small tremors) just happen," Sigala said.
There were no reports of damage from Friday's quake but there were reports of windows cracking and dishes rattling.
South Carolina each year has, on average, 10 to 15 earthquakes that register below magnitude 3. An earthquake between 3 and 4 normally is recorded about once every 18 months.
The area's most devastating quake on record was a magnitude 7.3 that rumbled near Charleston on Aug. 31, 1886, killing more than 100 people.
Comment on this Article
Global Temperature Highest in Millennia
Associated Press
25 Sept 06
WASHINGTON - The planet's temperature has climbed to levels not seen in thousands of years, warming that has begun to affect plants and animals, researchers report in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degree Fahrenheit per decade for the last 30 years, according to the research team led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
That brings the overall temperature to the warmest in the current interglacial period, which began about 12,000 years ago.
The researchers noted that a report in the journal Nature found that 1,700 plant, animal and insect species moved poleward at an average rate of about 4 miles per decade in the last half of the 20th century.
The warming has been stronger in the far north, where melting ice and snow expose darker land and rocks beneath allowing more warmth from the sun to be absorbed, and more over land than water.
Water changes temperature more slowly than land because of its great capacity to hold heat, but the researchers noted that the warming has been marked in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. Those oceans have a major effect on climate and warming that could lead to more El Nino episodes affecting the weather.
"This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution," Hansen said in a statement.
Few scientists doubt that the planet has warmed, though some question the causes of the change.
Hansen, who first warned of the danger of climate change decades ago, said that human-made greenhouse gases have become the dominant climate change factor.
The study said the recent warming has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree Celsius - 1.8 degree Fahrenheit - of the maximum temperature of the past million years.
"If further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about 3 million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today," Hansen said.
Comment on this Article
Scientists to unveil secrets of Mona Lisa
Reuters
25 Sept 06
PARIS - Scientists are due to unveil some of the secrets behind Western art's most enigmatic smile this week, when they present the findings of the most extensive three dimensional scan ever undertaken on the Mona Lisa.
Leonardo da Vinci's 16th century masterpiece, perhaps the world's most famous painting, is considered a milestone in the art of portraiture and an icon of European culture.
A comprehensive examination of the work, painted at some time around 1503-06, was undertaken in 2004, using special 3D technology developed by scientists from Canada's National Research Council (NRC).
The scientists scanned the picture on both sides to obtain high resolution 3D image data of the whole painting which the NRC says will shed new light on the history and condition of the work, as well as on Leonardo da Vinci's technique.
The portrait itself will remain in the Louvre museum in Paris, where it has gazed inscrutably out at visitors since it was moved there after the French Revolution.
But the NRC, which will unveil its findings on Tuesday ahead of a public lecture in Ottawa, promises its model will allow both art history specialists and the general public to get closer than ever before without risking damage to the picture.
It will also reveal important details about Leonardo's technique, including the so-called "sfumato" method by which he created a delicate hazy effect which contributes much to the painting's general air of remote mystery.
The young woman with the ambiguous half smile has been identified as Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine merchant named Francesco de Giocondo and her portrait has attracted admiration and curiosity since its creation 500 years ago.
Its popular status as Western art's most famous masterpiece was cemented in 1911 when it was stolen from the Louvre, sparking a massive hunt that saw even Pablo Picasso questioned by police before the painting turned up again two years later.
Comment on this Article
Computers taught to sort opinion from fact
UPI
25 Sept 06
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is funding a research project designed to teach computers to scan text and then sort opinion from fact.
The project involves Cornell University Professor of Computer Science Claire Cardie and associate professors of computer science Janyce Wiebe of the University of Pittsburgh and Ellen Riloff of the University of Utah.
The consortium is one of four University Affiliate Centers to conduct research on advanced methods for information analysis and to develop computational technologies that contribute to national security.
"Lots of work has been done on extracting factual information -- the who, what, where, when," explained Cardie. "We're interested in seeing how we would extract information about opinions."
The scientists will use machine-learning algorithms to give computers examples of text expressing both fact and opinion and then teach them to tell the difference.
Comment on this Article
Catastrophic mudslide could last 100 years, say scientists - Land in East Java likely to collapse as thousands flee - Attempts to seal channels will 'probably not succeed'
John Aglionby in Jakarta
Tuesday September 26, 2006
The Guardian
Mud, gas and boiling water that have been gushing out of the ground in East Java since May, submerging half a dozen villages and 20 factories, could continue for a century with "catastrophic consequences", European experts said yesterday. Efforts to seal the channels through which the mud is escaping are unlikely to succeed, and it is impossible to tell how much fluid remains underground, according to a University of Oslo geology team.
"It's unlikely to stop permanently for a long time," Adriano Mazzini told a press conference in Jakarta. "It's hard to say when the overpressure will have been fully released. It could be one, 10 or 100 years. But to seal it will be very, very difficult." According to Mr Mazzini, unless the flow stops soon, the affected land, which has already starting sinking, could subside significantly. "It will be catastrophic," he said.
The mud started flowing on May 29, a couple of hundred metres from where the gas company PT Lapindo Brantas was drilling an exploratory well nearly two miles deep. It has been gushing up to 50,000 cubic metres a day - or two large bathsfull a second - ever since.
At least four villages will almost certainly have to be destroyed, and two others have been flooded. More than 11,000 people have evacuated their homes.
On September 8, the central government, fearing a political disaster as well as the environmental impact, took command of the operation to stem the flow, control the flood (which now covers about 400 hectares (1,000 acres) and supervise the social programmes for the affected communities. A spokesman for the government team told the Guardian the latest findings were "useful and worrying". He said: "They show we still have a lot of work to do."
Observers said the president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, had been wise to intervene. "This could be the achilles heel of this government," said Dennis Heffernan, a political and business consultant. "Unless more resources are put to work, we're in danger of a catastrophe on the level of the Exxon Valdez."
The Exxon Valdez was an oil tanker that sank in Alaska in 1989, causing widespread environmental devastation.
All the expenses are being borne by Lapindo, which is controlled by the family of Indonesia's senior welfare minister, Aburizal Bakrie. Estimated costs are thought to be well over £70m, while the company's insurance only covered £15m.
Mr Mazzini, whose team has studied mud volcanoes for more than a decade and spent just under a week on site, said it was impossible to say conclusively whether the drilling caused the disaster.
There has been speculation that the disaster was caused by Lapindo failing to use a proper casing during drilling. Mr Mazzini said this was unlikely. "This is a huge case of overpressure," he said. "A casing would not have made any difference, I don't think. But I'm not a drilling expert."
The mudflow is thought to have been caused by one of four possibilities: gas-charged fluids breaching coral mounds on top of the limestone rock; a magmatic reaction generating gas; a new-born mud volcano; or hydrothermal fluids migrating from neighbouring areas.
Comment on this Article
Frost devastates Oz fruit harvest
The Daily Telegraph
September 26, 2006
THE Victorian Government must declare a natural disaster in the Goulburn Valley after frost devastated the region's fruit crops, a federal MP said today.
Temperatures unexpectedly plunged to minus five degrees celsius on Sunday night, ruining healthy young fruit - including apricot, plum, peach and plum crops - across the region.
Federal Murray MP Dr Sharman Stone said she had written to Victorian Premier Steve Bracks calling on him to declare a natural disaster to "open the door to financial assistance for orchardists".
The frost was expected to have destroyed half the region's output of fruit, Dr Stone said.
Farmers alone expected to lose $70 million, with losses multiplied through the picking, packing, canning and transport industries, she said.
"This follows five years of drought, hail last year at Shepparton East, the devastating frost of 2003 and record prices for water," Dr Stone said in a statement.
"If the state declares a natural disaster, they will be able to seek reimbursement for up to 75 per cent of their costs from the Federal Government once their expenditure reaches a certain threshold.
"Unfortunately, the process of natural disaster declaration begins with the State Government.
"They must start to think beyond the Great Divide and assist farmers who, through no fault of their own, are facing another severe downturn."
Comment on this Article
Iraq
Azzaman, Iraq: Deadlier Weapons Signal Start of 'Full Scale Civil War'
By Hadi Maraai
September 20, 2006
More deadly weapons have entered Iraq's the bloody sectarian fray, which shows that the country is at the doorstep of full-scale civil war.
Iraqis have always been armed to their teeth. For example, under former leader Saddam Hussein, officials were permitted to take an automatic rifle, a rocket launcher or even mortars home with them. If you declared loyalty to the regime, you could easily gain entry to the Baath Party armory. And whether you were really loyal hardly mattered.
But back then, there were no instances of Iraqis turning these guns against their neighbors who belonged to different religious sects or ethnic groups.
True, opposition groups occasionally waged mortar and Katyusha rocket attacks at the regime's security forces but we have no instances of Iraqis attacking Iraqis for sectarian, religious or ethnic reasons.
But today mortars and Katyushas are the weapons of choice for armed groups in residential areas of ethnically and religiously mixed cities. Opposing sects in villages now regularly resort to these deadly weapons, fired indiscriminately at civilians. Only God knows how many innocent Iraqis are being killed or maimed as a result of these attacks.
As night falls in Baghdad, mortars and Katyusha rockets begin falling on residential quarters. There is no one to hear or give a damn for the wails of children and women that break the silence of the night in the aftermath of such bombing.
For example, Baghdad at night, home to over five million people, turns into a battlefield. It is a tit for tat between the capital's various residential areas. If a Shiite-dominated quarter fires mortars and Katyushas at a Sunni-dominated area, then it goes without saying that the former will be targeted by the latter almost immediately.
The point is that every night, Baghdad and almost all of Iraq turned into no-man's land. Even the Americans don't have the guts to patrol any part of Baghdad at night.
So, the rebels, insurgents, militants, terrorists, or whatever you want to call them, have the entire arena to themselves.
How can peace and stability return to Iraq if government or occupation troops don't have the courage to remain on the streets of Baghdad and other major cities after 4 pm? There are reports that U.S. and Iraqi troops would like to dig a moat around Baghdad to prevent gunmen from entering the city.
But the gunmen are already inside the city.
Perhaps they will need to build moats separating different quarters of Baghdad and then move on to build walls between certain districts and separate streets from one another by concrete fortifications as is the case with the Green Zone ...
Comment on this Article
Losing a War, Winning a Police State
By Nat Parry
September 26, 2006
The New York Times disclosure of an official National Intelligence Estimate, which states that the Iraq invasion has worsened the global terrorist threat, carries an unspoken subtext - that the Bush administration is either woefully ignorant of how to combat terrorism or finds the terrorist threat a useful tool for managing the American public.
That's because on one level, the NIE, representing the consensus view of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, recognizes the obvious: that the invasion of Iraq has spawned a new generation of Islamic extremists who are determined to strike at the West, that Iraq has served as both a recruitment poster and a training ground for jihadists.
"The Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse" since Sept. 11, 2001, summarized one U.S. intelligence official in referring to the NIE, which was completed in April 2006. [NYT, Sept. 24, 2006]
But to many Americans, this conclusion comes as no surprise. Indeed, it was one of the central arguments of the antiwar movement before the invasion more than three years ago, that an unprovoked invasion of Iraq would inflame anti-Americanism and increase the terrorist threat at home and abroad.
Indeed, I wrote an article before the war essentially making that argument.
"The war's devastation and the U.S. occupation also could play into the hands of [Osama bin Laden, who] spelled out in a recent message that he plans to gain a propaganda advantage from any U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, by presenting himself as the defender of the Arab people," I wrote in February 2003. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Iraq's Liberation Day."]
Widespread Warnings
And it wasn't just journalists and bloggers offering warnings about the war's potential to fuel extremism and deepen the terrorist threat. Respected leaders both inside and outside the U.S. government offered dire warnings over the war's potential consequences.
For example, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who served as a Middle East envoy for George W. Bush, warned in October 2002 that by invading Iraq, "we are about to do something that will ignite a fuse in this region that we will rue the day we ever started."
Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser in the first Bush administration, said a strike on Iraq "could unleash an Armageddon in the Middle East." Former South African President Nelson Mandela said Bush was "introducing chaos into international affairs."
But George W. Bush brushed aside these warnings and proceeded with the invasion.
As the war and occupation have dragged on, more concerns were raised that heavy-handed U.S. tactics would further inflame Arab anger. Those worries were realized in the devastation of Fallujah, the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, and the massacre at Haditha - not to mention the grisly daily death toll of Iraqi civilians.
Yet, every step along the way, the Bush administration and its allies have bullied their domestic critics. Americans who raised questions before the war were sneered at as "cowards," "dupes" and "traitors."
Then, when the rosy predictions of Iraqis showering U.S. troops with flowers proved false, the administration berated the Iraq War critics some more, accusing them of "defeatism" and insisting that "staying the course" was the only appropriate option.
More recently, the critics have been mocked as "cut-and-runners," while Bush calls the Iraq War the "central front" in the "war on terror," which, in turn, he says is "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st Century."
But the downward spiral of the Iraq War and the worsening worldwide terrorism threat are negatives only if one assumes that creating a more peaceful and secure world was the original goal.
If the goal included changing the character of the United States as a free and open society - and consolidating one-party Republican control over the federal budget - then the administration's policies would seem to be working like a charm.
In the United States, which Bush calls part of the "battlefield" in the "global war on terror," fear has prompted millions of Americans to surrender constitutional rights willingly and accept government intrusions that would have been unthinkable before 9/11.
Fanned Fears
These domestic fears have been fanned by government claims of last-minute police actions to stop new acts of al-Qaeda terrorism, which later turn out to be over-hyped public relations stunts.
Since opting to charge alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla with crimes unrelated to original allegations that he was an "enemy combatant" - to avoid a Supreme Court showdown over presidential powers - the Bush administration was dealt another blow on Aug. 21 when a federal judge in Miami threw out one of the administration's charges against the alleged al-Qaeda operative.
U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke dropped a conspiracy charge against Padilla, saying that it violated constitutional prohibitions against double jeopardy. But the judge left intact two other terrorism-related counts against the former Chicago gang member.
Nevertheless, it's becoming increasingly clear that the original allegations against Padilla - an American citizen who was held without charges for 3 ½ years - were deeply flawed. The Padilla case also showed how readily the Bush administration cast aside constitutional guarantees of a speedy trial in which the government must present its evidence in public, one of the most fundamental rights dating back to English common law.
In the administration's other much-touted victory against "homegrown" terrorists, the case of the so-called Miami Seven accused of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, it appears that the alleged plot consisted of little more than loose talk. The accused had almost no ability to pull the scheme off and the case looks more like entrapment by federal agents.
According to court records, government informants provided money and a meeting place for the seven Miami men, gave them video cameras to conduct surveillance, and suggested that the first target of terrorism be a Miami FBI office. Lawyers for the defendants say their clients were lured into the scheme and had no contact with real al-Qaeda members.
Despite the criticism of FBI tactics, it appears that the trend may be towards an even more draconian approach to counter-terrorism efforts. On Aug. 29, the FBI
showcased to reporters a new database with more than 659 million records.
The "Investigative Data Warehouse," as it is called, includes terrorist watch lists, intelligence cables and financial transactions culled from more than 50 FBI and other government agency sources.
Unveiling the database was intended in part to address criticism that the FBI's technology was outdated as the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approached. But the database raised concerns from privacy advocates who worry about how long the government stores such information and about the right of citizens to know what records are being kept.
For instance, anyone who has ever lost or had a passport stolen could be considered suspect, and anyone who has been put on the government's notoriously inaccurate "no-fly" list also could be flagged in the FBI's database. The system includes 250 million airline passenger records, stored permanently.
Gurvais Grigg, acting director of the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, said every data source is reviewed by security, legal and technology staff members, and a privacy impact statement is created in order to safeguard civil liberties.
But David Sobel, senior counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the FBI's use of an internal privacy assessment undercuts the intent of the Privacy Act.
NSA Wiretaps
Also of concern is how this new database might use information from the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance program. The National Counterterrorism Center's terrorist watch list includes at least 325,000 people, and according to an NCTC official, the database includes names of suspected terrorists provided by all intelligence organizations, including NSA.
The NSA program has raised concerns because Bush is asserting that his presidential powers during the "war on terror" trump the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. The eavesdropping is being conducted without court oversight in apparent violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Security Act, passed in response to the COINTELPRO scandal of the 1970s.
At the end of a Senate investigation into domestic intelligence violations, Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, specifically cautioned against the vast potential for abuse if the NSA targeted American citizens.
The NSA's "capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," Church warned, "and no American would have any privacy left ... There would be no place to hide." [NYT,
Dec. 25, 2005]
All of the intelligence organizations, including the FBI, CIA and the NSA, are overseen by the Director of National Intelligence, a position created in early 2005 and now filled by former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte.
But the DNI's independence has always been in doubt. In calling on Congress to create the post of DNI in 2004, Bush made it clear that the director would serve "at the pleasure of the President."
Creating the post of DNI also required extensive revision of the 1947 National Security Act, a Cold War-era law which has undergone further revision since the creation of the DNI. In legislation passed by the House this year, the National Security Act was amended to grant the DNI more power and authority.
The legislation, now before the Senate, provides the DNI new authority to "have access to all national intelligence ... concerning the human intelligence operations of any element of the intelligence community," and authorizes personnel designated by the DNI "to make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in the presence of such personnel."
The new arrest powers follow similar authority granted to the U.S. Secret Service. In the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005, the Secret Service was granted the same power in identical language.
Expanded Powers
Civil libertarians question the steady expansion of government powers within the Executive Branch. This concern has deepened with the tendency of agencies, such as the Secret Service, to engage in law enforcement activities that are political in nature.
During the Bush presidency, the Secret Service has shielded the President from dissenters. Since 2001, the Secret Service has been establishing "free speech zones" for protesters to gather, while police have arrested people who express opposition to Bush's policies outside of the designated areas.
At a Florida Bush rally in 2001, three demonstrators - including two elderly women - were arrested for holding up small protest placards outside the "free speech zone." In 2003, also in Florida, seven protesters were arrested when they refused to be cordoned off into a protest zone hundreds of yards from a Bush rally at USF Sun Dome.
In general, these demonstrators have been arrested by local police at the behest of the Secret Service, but this could change with the new powers granted to the Secret Service by the Patriot Act reauthorization of 2006.
Not only does the law grant the Secret Service new powers of arrest, but it also increases fines and penalties for individuals who "willfully and knowingly ... enter or remain in any posted, cordoned off, or otherwise restricted area of a building or grounds where the President ... will be temporarily visiting."
Beyond expanding powers for the DNI and the Secret Service, Congress also is moving to grant the President more authority over the National Guard.
Governors across the nation are complaining about a bill that has passed the House of Representatives that would expand Bush's authority to take over National Guard troops in case of a natural disaster or a "homeland security threat."
The legislation was criticized by Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican, as symptomatic of a wider federal effort to make states no more than "satellites of the national government."
Huckabee, who is chairman of the National Governors Association, said the legislation would end the historic link between the states and their Guard units and "violates 200 years of American history."
Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, pointed out that for "230-plus years governors have had control of their National Guard and have done a good job," but "all of a sudden, there are one or two lines in a bill that no one has debated and no one has discussed to take that authority away."
While the governors express frustration over the usurpation of authority that has traditionally belonged to the states, there is a larger concern. That is the trend toward centralized authoritarianism that will be accelerated by granting Bush total control over the National Guard.
This trend may speed up even more if Congress effectively grants amnesty to the administration over violations of the Geneva Conventions, and essentially gives the President new authority to interpret Common Article 3, which sets standards for treatment of prisoners of war.
Although billed as a "compromise," the Republican-sponsored legislation provides the Executive Branch legal cover for authorizing interrogation techniques that are widely considered violations of domestic and international law.
War on Iran?
As alarming as the drift towards increased authoritarianism may be, it could pale against what might be in store if the Bush administration attacks Iran over its nuclear program.
In a report for the Century Foundation, retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner asserted that "the summer of diplomacy is over," and argued that "the diplomatic activity of the past several months was just a pretext for the military option."
Dave Lindorff, writing in The Nation,
reported that the Bush administration and the Pentagon have moved up the deployment of a major "strike group" of ships to sail to the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast.
Lindorff points out that "the Eisenhower Strike Group, bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles, has received orders to depart the United States in a little over a week." Navy sources confirmed that the armada is due off the coast of Iran on or around Oct. 21.
The strongest argument against the possibility of the U.S. striking Iran is that such an attack doesn't make any sense.
Skeptics point out that the military option would likely be counterproductive, if not catastrophic. There are fears that Iran (and perhaps Venezuela) would cut off oil shipments, possibly sending the price of oil to upwards of $200 a barrel. Iran also could launch strikes on Israel, and take revenge against American forces in Iraq.
Furthermore, there is the possibility that Hezbollah sleeper cells exist in the United States, and could be activated by Iran in the event of a U.S. attack. Press reports
indicate that the FBI has launched new probes in New York and other cities targeting alleged members of Hezbollah, in anticipation of a U.S.-Iran showdown.
If the U.S. does launch an attack, it seems clear that the terrorism threat faced by Americans at home and abroad will dramatically increase. For such reasons, many observers argue that an attack on Iran is unlikely.
But Gardiner points out that not making sense won't limit what the Bush administration does. "The 'making sense' filter was not applied over the past four years for Iraq, and it is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to attack Iran," Gardiner writes.
It also could be that "making sense" means something different for the Bush administration than it does for average Americans.
Although the Iraq War has cost about 2,700 American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars from the Treasury, the war has created great business opportunities for well-connected corporations such as Halliburton and Bechtel, which have registered substantial profits from the occupation and "rebuilding" of Iraq.
Also, although U.S. intelligence agencies now agree that the terrorist threat has ballooned due to the Iraq War, the Bush administration has found the conflict useful in simultaneously expanding its powers, abrogating constitutional rights and justifying more government secrecy.
Those trends seem likely to continue - and even accelerate - as the "war on terror" remains a powerful excuse for transforming the United States from a historically free and open society to a frightened nation where citizens eagerly trade their constitutional rights for government promises of more security.
Comment on this Article
Saddam ejected again from genocide trial
By Mussab Al-Khairalla and Peter Graff
Reuters
Sep 26, 2006
BAGHDAD - Saddam Hussein was ejected from his genocide trial for a third day on Tuesday and his co-defendants tried to storm out after him, as chaos reined following the sacking of the chief judge last week.
Judge Mohammed al-Ureybi had opened the hearing with a lecture to Saddam not to disrupt the proceedings, and allowed him to read a 20-minute written statement, with microphones off so those in the glass-enclosed press gallery could not hear.
But after listening to two Kurdish witnesses, Saddam again began to argue and the judge lost his patience.
"You are a defendant and I'm a judge," Ureybi said. "Shut up, no-one talk ... The court has decided to eject Saddam Hussein from court."
As Saddam left smiling, his six co-defendants - top officials under Saddam - stood and tried to follow him out, demanding they leave too. The judge shouted back: "Get Saddam out and put the others back in their seats."
Several co-defendants started shouting and pointing fingers at the judge. Ureybi ejected one, former defense minister Sultan Hashim, before ordering a recess.
Unusually, the sound was left on for television broadcasts, allowing all Iraqis to watch and listen as pandemonium broke out in the courtroom for several minutes.
PREVIOUS JUDGE FIRED
Saddam was also expelled from the courtroom during the last two hearings for protesting against the sacking of Ureybi's predecessor as chief judge, Abdullah al-Amiri. The government fired Amiri last week for saying Saddam was "not a dictator".
Saddam and the other six could face hanging over the deaths of an estimated 180,000 Kurdish villagers in 1988, including thousands killed by poison gas.
He and his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid - dubbed "Chemical Ali" by Iraqis - face genocide charges. Five others face charges of mass murder and crimes against humanity.
International legal rights groups have said the sacking of the judge could hurt the legitimacy of the outcome of the trial. But prosecutors said Amiri had been too lenient, allowing Saddam to threaten witnesses. He once told accusers in court he would "crush their heads".
The trial has featured moving testimony from villagers recounting their suffering during the Anfal - "Spoils of War" - campaign, when Saddam's forces attacked Kurds accused of helping Iran during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
Before Saddam was ejected on Tuesday, the court heard from Aasi Mustafa Ahmed, a villager in his 50s who said he had been an Iraqi army conscript and prisoner of war in Iran. When he returned home in 1990 he found his house destroyed and his wife and four children missing, never to be seen again.
Asked if he sought compensation, he said: "If you gave me the whole world, it wouldn't make up for one of my children's fingernails."
All the defense lawyers walked out last week after Amiri was sacked as chief judge and have not returned, but court-appointed lawyers are in place.
Comment on this Article
Army holds Pentagon to ransom over Iraq - America's top uniformed army officer has refused to submit his service's budget request for fiscal 2008
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
UK Independent
26 Sept 06
In a fresh sign of the intense strains placed by the Iraq war on the US military, America\'s top uniformed army officer has refused to submit his service\'s budget request for fiscal 2008.
General Pete Schoomaker, chief of staff of the army, said it could not fulfil its mission within the existing financial limits set by Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary.
At the same time, the army has been forced to extend the combat tour of a key infantry brigade in strife-torn al-Anbar province to allow the battle-weary unit that is due to replace it to enjoy the minimum 12-month interval between tours at the front.
The move affects 4,000 men of the 1st Brigade of the 1st Armoured Division, currently based at Ramadi in the heart of the \"Sunni Triangle\", who will now have to spend an extra six weeks there before returning to their base in Germany in February.
The announcement by the Pentagon yesterday is the latest evidence of how the long war in Iraq and the intensifying conflict in Afghanistan are stretching the army\'s resources to the limit and beyond. Far from cutting back on Iraq deployment, as the Bush administration had hoped, the Pentagon has had to boost US troop strength in recent months to some 145,000, as sectarian violence has intensified.
No less indicative has been the extraordinary decision by General Schoomaker not to present a budget for the financial year starting in October 2007.
This week, Congress will approve a Pentagon budget for the year starting this October of a total $447bn (£235bn) for defence, including a basic army budget of $98bn, as well as a special $70bn supplementary fund to pay for the two wars, and replace equipment lost or worn out in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But General Schoomaker insists this is far short of what is required. According to the Los Angeles Times yesterday, he wants $139bn for the army in 2007-08 - more than $25bn above the limit set by Mr Rumsfeld - and a 41 per cent increase on the allocation for 2006-07. In the end, he chose to miss the 15 August deadline for submission of a budget.
The Defence Secretary has since agreed to a study group, which is understood to basically agree with Gen Schoomaker. But after years of watching their basic budget requests chipped away by Mr Rumsfeld and various congressional committees, army chiefs are now in little mood to compromise.
The army has a total active-duty strength of 504,000, of whom 400,000 have done at least one tour in either Iraq and Afghanistan, and some 150,000 have done two.
Barring an unlikely improvement in the security situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, such pressures will remain. If funding is not increased, the alternatives are uniformly unattractive. The army could scale back its commitments. If not, commanders admit, it will have to make greater use of the National Guard. A third possibility would be the reintroduction of the draft, but that is flatly opposed by President Bush and Mr Rumsfeld.
* Three Marines will face courts-martial on charges of murdering an Iraqi man in the town of Hamdania. The three were among seven Marines and one Navy serviceman accused of kidnapping and murdering 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad last April. The other five face preliminary hearings in coming weeks.
Comment on this Article
Army chief tells Bush: there's not enough money for Iraq war
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and Richard Norton-Taylor
September 26, 2006
The Guardian
George Bush suffered a serious rebuke of his wartime leadership yesterday when his army chief said he did not have enough money to fight the war in Iraq.
Six weeks before midterm elections in which the war is a crucial issue, the protest from the army head, General Peter Schoomaker, exposes concerns within the US military about the strain of the war on Iraq, and growing tensions between uniformed personnel and the Pentagon chief, Donald Rumsfeld.
Three retired senior military officers yesterday accused Mr Rumsfeld of bungling the war on Iraq, and said the Pentagon was "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically". Major General Paul Eaton, a retired officer who was in charge of training Iraq troops, said: "Mr Rumsfeld and his immediate team must be replaced or we will see two more years of extraordinarily bad decision-making."
The rare criticism from the three officers, all veterans of the Iraq war, is an embarrassment to Mr Bush at a time when his party had hoped to campaign on its strong leadership in the "war on terror".
The officers echoed the findings of the National Intelligence Estimate at the weekend, which said the Iraq war had fuelled Islamist extremism around the world. They also accused the Pentagon of putting soldiers' lives at risk by failing to provide the best equipment available. "Why are we asking our soldiers and marines to use the same armour we found was insufficient in 2003?" asked Thomas Hammes, a retired Marine Corps colonel.
The criticism comes amid an unprecedented show of defiance from the army chief, Gen Schoomaker. The general refused to submit a budget plan for 2008 to Mr Rumsfeld, arguing the military could not continue operations in Iraq and its other missions without additional funds, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday. The seriousness of the protest was underlined by Gen Schoomaker's reputation as an ally of the Pentagon chief. The general came out of retirement at Mr Rumsfeld's request to take up the post.
"It's quite a debacle," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute thinktank. "Virtually everyone in the army feels as though their needs have been shortchanged."
Gen Schoomaker's defiance gives a voice to growing concern within the military about the costs of America's wars, and the long-term strain of carrying out operations around the world.
For the past three years, the $400bn (£210bn) cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded by emergency spending bills passed by Congress. But Gen Schoomaker and others say the Iraq war has also put a severe strain on regular budgets. That puts the generals at odds with Mr Rumsfeld's strategic vision of a more nimble, hi-tech military. In addition, Congress and the White House have cut a number of army spending requests over the past months. "There is no sense in us submitting a budget that we can't execute, a broken budget," he told a Washington audience.
As the war in Iraq continues with no sign of a reduction in US forces, military officials have repeatedly complained about the strain on personnel, and say they fear they may be forced to rely more heavily on the National Guard and reservists to meet the demands of overseas deployments. General John Abizaid, America's senior commander in the Middle East, said last week there was little chance of any drawing down of the 140,000 forces in Iraq before next spring.
The burden of that commitment was underlined yesterday when the army extended the combat tours of about 4,000 soldiers serving in the Ramadi area.
In Basra yesterday, British troops killed a prominent al-Qaida figure who was hiding in Iraq after escaping from US custody in Afghanistan last year, the ministry of defence said. Omar Faruq was shot dead while resisting arrest during a pre-dawn raid by 250 soldiers after a long-planned intelligence-led operation. A British military spokesman described Faruq as a "very, very significant man".
Comment on this Article
Army Warns Rumsfeld It's Billions Short - An extraordinary action by the chief of staff sends a message: The Pentagon must increase the budget or reduce commitments in Iraq and elsewhere.
By Peter Spiegel
Times Staff Writer
September 25, 2006
WASHINGTON - The Army's top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.
The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.
"This is unusual, but hell, we're in unusual times," said a senior Pentagon official involved in the budget discussions.
Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service's funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.
According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army's budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker's request a 41% increase over current levels.
"It's incredibly huge," said the Army official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity when commenting on internal deliberations. "These are just incredible numbers."
Most funding for the fighting in Iraq has come from annual emergency spending bills, with the regular defense budget going to normal personnel, procurement and operational expenses, such as salaries and new weapons systems.
About $400 billion has been appropriated for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars through emergency funding measures since Sept. 11, 2001, with the money divided among military branches and government agencies.
But in recent budget negotiations, Army officials argued that the service's expanding global role in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism - outlined in strategic plans issued this year - as well as fast-growing personnel and equipment costs tied to the Iraq war, have put intense pressure on its normal budget.
"It's kind of like the old rancher saying: 'I'm going to size the herd to the amount of hay that I have,' " said Lt. Gen. Jerry L. Sinn, the Army's top budget official. "Schoomaker can't size the herd to the size of the amount of hay that he has because he's got to maintain the herd to meet the current operating environment."
The Army, with an active-duty force of 504,000, has been stretched by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. About 400,000 have done at least one tour of combat duty, and more than a third of those have been deployed twice. Commanders have increasingly complained of the strain, saying last week that sustaining current levels will require more help from the National Guard and Reserve or an increase in the active-duty force.
Schoomaker first raised alarms with Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in June after he received new Army budget outlines from Rumsfeld's office. Those outlines called for an Army budget of about $114 billion, a $2-billion cut from previ