Pre-formed humans depicted in sperm cells, known as "homunculi."
Written by Anonymous for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Anonymous is a practicing Catholic who writes for RH Reality Check on the church and contraception.
Half a century ago, the pope appointed a commission to study the morality of birth control. Multiple choice: What do you think their findings were?
A) Birth control is not “intrinsically evil.”
B) Married couples should be allowed to decide for themselves whether or not to use birth control.
C) Artificial birth control is an extension of methods of natural family planning already accepted by the Catholic Church.
D) All of the above.
You may be as astonished as I was to learn that the answer is “D.”
After I wrote my essay, “Why I Skipped Mass Today”, I decided to investigate my church’s historical attitudes toward contraception a little further. Let me start at the beginning, shortly after “The Beginning,” with a story from Genesis.
Was this young man killed by Saudi police?
The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt may have mixed results thus far, but they had an authenticity to them. Then, the cynical manipulators, always looking to ride popular waves to personal gain, latched on. And we had big oil and big intelligence giving a huge boost to dissenters in Libya. And now in Syria.
But there are other uprisings where those interests are not invested. In fact, they want them to fail.
Real journalism does not take sides. But it does try and accurately cover everything that is going on—not just those examples that serve one particular agenda.
Some time back, we told you about the uprising in Saudi Arabia that the media ignores. That continues. Another is in Bahrain. And another is in Yemen.
Let’s check in with the Unauthorized Arab Spring, Saudi style:
SAUDI SPRING
Recently, we heard from someone in the area. He wrote (in good but imprecise English, so the following has been minimally edited for clarity):
Hello Russ,
This is Hussain. I’m from Qatif, east Saudi Arabia. I read your article ”The Saudi Arab Spring Nobody Noticed” and I thought that you would be interested following the updates of the pro-democracy protest. Because nobody, or few non-Arabs, know details about Qatif, we recently opened an English page in Facebook for updating international community.
Of course, since you published the article, the protests didn’t stop. Recently, 4 more people were martyred in Qatif by the live bullets of Saudi Forces. They don’t use water or tear gas to stop the protestors, they use live bullets, shooting with a kalashnikov! They didn’t come to my beloved city with police, they came with tanks as if they were going to war!
As you know, Shi’a is a minority comparing to the whole country. But, they are a majority in the Eastern rich-oil Province where their population is almost 4-5 million.
Unfortunately, ministry of interior is always lying, always, to smokescreen their crimes with stupid reasons. They said there were wounded policemen. There weren’t! Because, logically, they are the only side which is armed. They don’t even come near protestors unless inside their tanks. Protestors are armed by the bravery of shouting the word, holding the banners.
Please, watch these videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr0yr8V7IVw&feature=youtube_gdata_player
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PTSjzJhMmk&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Regards,
Hussain
By the way, Occupy Qatif says its Twitter account was suspended, and that it had to start a new one. Hmmm. Nothing to do with that Saudi prince buying $300 million in Twitter insider shares?
Oh, and be sure and check out this Facebook page for Occupy Qatif. You can read claims (and see possible supporting evidence) that activists and civilians are being arrested, kidnapped, shot. Where is the world press on this? What does the State Department have to say?
A lighter note from their Facebook page: The activists in Eastern Saudi Arabia, perhaps surprisingly (and perhaps not!) like the work of the late comedian and social commentator George Carlin. So do we. Wonder how popular Carlin’s critique, and his skepticism toward authority and organized religion, is with the Saudi royals? Hey, now that’s the kind of soft feature the corporate media might enjoy covering.
GRAPHIC: http://a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/430064_392033890814071_388352374515556_1814371_347784781_n.jpg
WhoWhatWhy is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news site founded by Russ Baker. Follow it on Facebookand Twitteror visit WhoWhatWhy.com
Written by Carole Joffe for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
The last ten days or so we have seen Republicans, and their religious allies, wage a war against contraception—and bungle it badly. With poll after poll showing that a majority of Americans support contraceptive coverage in health reform, and with the 98 percent figure (of American women who have ever used contraception in the context of heterosexual sex) endlessly repeated in the media, the Republicans nonetheless push ahead with this attack, providing a welcome gift to the Obama reelection campaign and much material to political artists and comics. I have lost count of the number of parodies that have been inspired by that now gone viral picture of five male clerics testifying at the Congressional hearing called by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). A picture that of course immediately brings to mind another image of a similar tone deaf moment on the part of social conservatives, the nine men surrounding President George W. Bush as he became the first president to sign a ban on a particular technique of performing abortion, in the case of so-called “partial birth abortion.” It’s no wonder that the term “patriarchy” has made a comeback in the blogs!
The well-publicized refusal of Issa to permit the testimony of a female witness put forward by the Democrats, Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student planning to speak to the health consequences of denied contraception at Catholic universities, only added to the disastrous p.r. of that event. And the “aspirin between her knees” remark of Rick Santorum’s major funder later that day didn’t help either.
But while the media is momentarily fixated on the second big story this month of a losing fight against family planning (remember the Susan G. Komen Fund fiasco?), less attention has been paid to a related war that is not going well at all. The assault on abortion that has resulted from the 2010 elections–the Republican takeover of Congress and many statehouses and governorships–has arguably produced the most serious threat to abortion access since the Roe decision in 1973. What we mainly have heard about this situation are the statistics, the unprecedented number of abortion restrictions introduced and eventually passed in state legislatures at a time when one might assume politicians’ focus would be on the economy.
But there are real people behind the numbers and details of the restrictions. And the enormous toll that the abortion wars take on individual women seeking the procedure and the providers who try to help them are insufficiently appreciated by the general public.
Nuclear Damage Control
By Karen Charman on Feb 10, 2012
This article originally appeared on WhoWhatWhy.com
What if you were promoting an industry that had the potential to kill and injure enormous numbers of people as well as contaminate large areas of land for tens of thousands of years? What if this industry created vast stockpiles of deadly waste but nevertheless required massive amounts of public funding to keep it going? My guess is that you might want to hide that information.
From the heyday of the environmental movement in the late 1960s through the late 1970s, many people were openly skeptical about the destructive potential of the nuclear power industry. After the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in central Pennsylvania in March 1979 and the explosion of Chernobyl’s unit four reactor in the Ukraine in April 1986, few would have predicted that nuclear power could ever shake off its global pariah status.
Yet, thanks to diligent lobbying efforts, strong government support, and a full public-relations blitz over the past decade, the once-reviled nuclear industry succeeded in recasting itself in the public mind as an essential, affordable, clean (low carbon emission), and safe energy option in a warming world. In fact, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has just cleared the way for granting the first two licenses for any new reactors in more than 30 years. The new reactors will be built at the Vogtle plant in Georgia, southeast of Augusta.
Even so, the ongoing crisis following meltdowns in three of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan nearly a year ago has shined an unwanted spotlight on the dark side of nuclear power, once again raising questions about the reliability and safety of atomic reactors.
In response, the nuclear industry and its supporters have employed sophisticated press manipulation to move the public conversation away from these thorny issues. One example is PBS’s recent Frontline documentary, Nuclear Aftershocks, which examines the viability of nuclear power in a post-Fukushima world.
What follows is a detailed critique of many of the issues raised in the program, which initially aired January 17, 2012.
***
In the program, NASA’s celebrated chief climate scientist, James Hansen—who has a penchant for getting arrested protesting the extraction and burning of the dirtiest fossil fuels—says that the Fukushima accident was “really extremely bad timing.” Though it was at the end of a statement about the harm of continuing to burn fossil fuels, Hansen’s comment begs the question: Is there ever a good time or place for a nuclear catastrophe?
Under the cloud of what some experts believe is already worse than Chernobyl, the nuclear industry and its supporters are scrambling to put as good a face on the Fukushima Daiichi disaster as possible.
Fukushima’s triple meltdowns, which are greatly complicating and prolonging the cleanup of the estimated 20 million metric tons of debris from the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami last March, present a steep public relations challenge.
The strategy seems to be: 1) to acknowledge the undeniable—the blown-up reactor buildings that look like they were bombed in a war, the massive release of radionuclides into the environment, the fact that tens of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes and livelihoods, and that some areas may not be habitable for generations, if ever. But then, 2) after coming clean about those harsh truths, downplay or dismiss the harm of the ongoing radiation contamination, invoking (irrational) “fear” as the much greater danger. And 3) frame discussion of the need for nuclear power in the even scarier context of global warming-induced catastrophic climate change (this despite the irony that the reality of global warming is still rejected by fossil fuel industry partisans and growing numbers of the public who have been swayed by the industry’s media-amplified misinformation). Whether consciously or not, Frontline’s Nuclear Aftershocks adheres to this PR strategy.
The program begins with a harrowing view of nuclear power at its most destructive. Viewers see close-ups of the three destroyed Fukushima Daiichi reactors with the tops of their buildings blown off amidst the wreckage around the plant. Real time video captured on cell phones shows the precipitating earthquake, and there is film of the ensuing tsunami that engulfed the plant.
Frontline also captures the dystopian scene of an utterly destroyed landscape littered with seemingly unending tracts of twisted and broken buildings, infrastructure, and the various trappings of modern Japanese life—much of it now radioactive detritus. A member of the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission who toured the plant six weeks after the beginning of the disaster sums it up with this simple comment: “This scenery is beyond my imagination.”
Frontline clearly explains how, without electricity to run the valves and pumps that push water through the reactors’ cooling systems, the intensely radioactive and thermally hot fuel in three of the six General Electric Mark 1 boiling water reactors (BWRs) then in operation quickly began to melt. (Loss of all electricity is one of the most dangerous situations for a nuclear reactor, and is known as a station blackout.) This in turn led to a build-up of hydrogen, which is highly combustible, in the reactor buildings where any small spark could—and did—trigger explosions.
“It was an unprecedented multiple meltdown disaster,” Frontline correspondent Miles O’Brien reports. “For the first time since the Chernobyl accident in 1986, large quantities of dangerous radioactive materials—about one-tenth of the Chernobyl release—spewed into the atmosphere from a stricken nuclear power plant.”
As bad as that was, O’Brien says the problems for plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco,) were only just beginning. That’s because Tepco had to try to keep the reactors cooled with enough water in order to prevent the absolute worst, what is popularly but misleadingly referred to as “The China Syndrome.”
According to nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, a China Syndrome accident is a three-stage progression. In stage one, all of the fuel inside a reactor melts and turns into a blob at the bottom of the reactor core (the “meltdown”). In stage two, the molten radioactive blob eats through the nuclear reactor vessel (“a melt-through”), which in the case of GE Mark 1 BWRs is an eight-inch steel encasement. Housing the reactor vessel is the containment structure, three feet of concrete lined with two inches of steel. If the melted nuclear fuel were to bore through that and hit the natural water table below the plant, it would result in a massive steam explosion that would send most of the reactor’s deadly contents into the air, where they would disperse far and wide.
Although CUNY physics professor Michio Kaku said on ABC’s Nightline, that Tepco’s efforts were “like a squirt gun trying to put out a forest fire,” the company was able to get enough water in to keep the fuel cool enough to prevent the absolute worst case.
Gundersen says that was the good news.
The bad news is that the water that has come into direct contact with the melted fuel in the three destroyed reactors (including water that is still covering them) is leaking out the side through cracks in the containment structures, filling other buildings at the plant, and seeping down into the groundwater below and around the plant and directly into the Pacific Ocean. Frontline acknowledges the problem, pointing out that because of the high levels of radiation, it will be “a long time” before the site is decontaminated enough for anyone to be able to get inside the reactor to see exactly where the cracks are and to fix them.
As significant a problem as this ongoing contamination is, the biggest discharges of radioactivity into the Pacific—considered the largest ever release of radioactive material into the sea—occurred within the first seven weeks of the accident. At its peak concentration, cesium-137 levels from Fukushima were 50 million times greater than levels measured before the accident, according to research by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution chemist, Ken Buesseler and two Japanese colleagues.
It’s impossible to know exactly how much radioactivity contaminated the Pacific or what the full impact on the marine food chain will be. A preliminary estimate by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency reported in the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun in October said that more than 15 quadrillion becquerels of radioactivity poured into the ocean just from the Fukushima Unit 1 reactor between March 21st and April 30th last year. (One quadrillion equals 1,000 trillion.)
A report in January in the Montreal Gazette noted that Japanese testing for radioactive cesium revealed contamination in sixteen of 22 species of fish exported to Canada. Radioactive cesium was found in 73 percent of the mackerel tested, 91 percent of the halibut, 92 percent of the sardines, 93 percent of the tuna and eel, 94 percent of the cod and anchovies, and 100 percent of the carp, seaweed, shark, and monkfish. These tests were conducted in November and indicate that the radioactivity is spreading, because tuna, for example, is caught at least 900 kilometers (560 miles) off shore.
Real Health Concerns or Just Fear?
In summing up the disaster, Frontline’s O’Brien says: “The earthquake and tsunami had stripped whole towns from their foundations, killing an estimated 18,000 people. Life is forever changed here.”
But then he shifts from documenting the undeniable devastation to speculating on how big a problem remains: “[T]he big concern remains the radioactive fallout from the Fukushima nuclear explosions. People here are fearful about how much radiation there is, how far it has spread, and the possible health effects.”
Japanese citizens have decried their government’s decision to allow radiation exposures of up to 20 millisieverts a year before ordering an evacuation. O’Brien equates this level with “two or three abdominal CAT scans in the same period” but nevertheless characterizes it as “conservative.” What follows is his exchange with Dr. Gen Suzuki, a radiation specialist with the Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission.
MILES O’BRIEN: [on camera] So at 20 millisieverts over the course of a long period of time, what is the increased cancer risk?
GEN SUZUKI, Radiation specialist, Nuclear Safety Comm.: Yeah, it’s 0.2— 0.2 percent increase in lifetime.
MILES O’BRIEN: [on camera] 0.2 percent over the course of a lifetime?
GEN SUZUKI: Yeah.
MILES O’BRIEN: So your normal risk of cancer in Japan is?
GEN SUZUKI: Is 30 percent.
MILES O’BRIEN: So what is the increased cancer rate?
GEN SUZUKI: 30.2 percent, so the increment is quite small.
MILES O’BRIEN: And yet the fear is quite high.
GEN SUZUKI: Yes, that’s true.
MILES O’BRIEN: [voice-over] People are even concerned here, in Fukushima City, outside the evacuation zone, where radiation contamination is officially below any danger level.
Missing from the above exchange is both established and emerging radiation biology science, as well as the fact that radiation exposure is linked to numerous other health problems from immune system damage, heart problems and gastro-intestinal ailments to birth defects, including Down’s syndrome.
Gundersen points out that, according to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences 2006 BEIR report (BEIR stands for Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation), an annual exposure of 20 millisieverts will cause cancer in one of every 500 people. Since this is an annual exposure rate, the risk multiplies with each year of exposure. So, for example, five years of exposure to 20 millisieverts will result in an additional cancer in one in 100 people.
Gundersen notes that the risk is not the same for all population groups. According to Table 12-D in BEIR VII Phase 2, the younger the person exposed, the greater the risk of cancer.
Girls are nearly twice as vulnerable as boys of the same age, while an infant girl is seven times and a five-year-old girl five times more likely to get radiation-induced cancer than a 30-year-old male. Using BEIR’s risk data, one in 100 girls will develop cancer for every year that they are exposed to 20 millisieverts. If they are exposed for five years, the rate increases to one in twenty.
New radiobiology science shows even more cause for concern. Numerous studies of nuclear workers over the last six years—including one authored by 51 radiation scientists that looked at more than 400,000 nuclear workers in 15 countries—found higher incidences of cancer at significantly lower exposure rates than what Japan is allowing.
This finding is important because it challenges the application of the highly questionable data from the Japanese atom bomb survivors that authorities use to set radiation exposure limits.
Nuclear reactors emit low doses of radionuclides into the air as part of their normal operation. Because workers are generally exposed to repeated low doses over time, compared to an initial very high dose from a nuclear bomb, this data is a much more accurate predictor of radiation-induced cancer in people in fallout zones, or downwind of nuclear reactors, than records of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.
Despite the fact that the National Academy of Sciences accepts that there is no safe dose of radiation, nuclear proponents have long insisted that low doses provided very little, if any, risk from cancer. (Some even say it’s beneficial.)
But new evidence shows otherwise. Chromosomal translocations (or aberrations), a kind of genetic injury that occurs when DNA molecules damaged by genotoxic chemicals or radiation don’t properly repair themselves, are well documented in cases of medium to high radiation exposure. Chromosomal translocations are also known to increase the risk of many forms of cancer.
Until recently, it wasn’t clear whether low-dose exposures caused chromosomal translocations. A 2010 study looking at the impact of medical X rays on chromosomes not only found that this chromosomal damage occurs with low dose radiation exposure, but that there were more chromosomal translocations per unit of radiation below 20 millisieverts (the Japanese limit) and—surprisingly—“orders of magnitude” more of this kind of damage at exposures below 10 millisieverts.
Frontline’s complacent assessment of the “small increment” of increased cancer risk to Japanese citizens from the ongoing Fukushima fallout contrasts sharply with an assessment by the Canadian Medical Association Journal. That peer-reviewed journal quotes health experts who say the levels of radiation the Japanese government has set before requiring evacuation, combined with a “culture of cover-up” and insufficient cleanup, is exposing Japanese citizens to “unconscionable” levels of radiation.
CMAJ notes that instead of expanding the evacuation zone around the plant to 50 miles, as international authorities have urged, the Japanese government has chosen to “define the problem out of existence” by raising the allowable level of exposure to one that is twenty times higher than the international standard of one millisievert per year.
This “arbitrary increase” in the maximum permissible dose of radiation is an “unconscionable” failure of government, contends [chair of the Medical Association for Prevention of Nuclear War, Tilman] Ruff. “Subject a class of 30 children to 20 millisieverts of radiation for five years and you’re talking an increased risk of cancer to the order of about 1 in 30, which is completely unacceptable. I’m not aware of any other government in recent decades that’s been willing to accept such a high level of radiation-related risk for its population.”
Frontline’s take epitomizes a longstanding pattern of denying radiation health effects, even in the most dire nuclear disasters (though Fukushima is arguably the most dire to date) and blaming it on the victims’ personal habits or their levels of stress from fear of radiation. This was done to the victims of the March 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in central Pennsylvania, to Chernobyl victims, and it is happening again with Fukushima.
Nuclear TINA
But what about alternatives? Are there any, or does Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan regarding capitalist globalization, “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) apply?
Frontline answers this question by going to Germany, where correspondent O’Brien probes the German psyche in an attempt to learn why nuclear power elicits such a strong negative reaction there.
He questions several German citizens, including an adorable little boy, on why they are so afraid of nuclear power. He speaks with the head of the German government committee tasked with considering how to phase out nuclear power, as well as a German energy economist, who says the decision is not likely to change.
And he expresses astonishment that an industrial nation the scale of Germany has decided to shut down all seventeen of its reactors, which account for 23 percent of its electricity generation, within a decade.
Standing in a field that he identifies as the world’s largest solar farm with solar panels as far as the eye can see, O’Brien says Germans support this “seemingly rash decision” because they have faith that there is an alternative.
He then informs viewers that over the past 20 years, Germany has “invested heavily in renewables, with tax subsidies for wind turbines and solar energy,” adding, “It’s kind of surprising to see [the world’s largest solar farm] in a place like this with such precious little sunshine.”
Though he says there is plenty of wind, he characterizes Germany’s target of producing 80 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2050 as a “bold bet” whose success will depend on technological breakthroughs to store enough wind or other renewable energy (presumably through improved battery technology) so that it can provide a steady source of power. He notes that the steady production of power is something “nuclear energy does very well.”
Atomiconomics
Any honest discussion of nuclear power—especially when raising the issue of tax subsidies and other government support for renewable sources like wind and solar—must include information on the many hundreds of billions of dollars of public support thrown its way. Despite the highly publicized recent bankruptcy of Solyndra, this support dwarfs what has been given to renewables.
In the executive summary to his February 2011 report on nuclear subsidies, energy economist Doug Koplow says the “long and expensive history of taxpayer subsidies and excessive charges to utility ratepayers…not only enabled the nation’s existing reactors to be built in the first place, [they] have also supported their operation for decades.”
Every part of the nuclear fuel chain—mining, milling and enriching the uranium fuel; costs associated with the construction, running, and shutting down and cleaning up of reactors; the waste; and even the lion’s share of the liability in the case of an accident—has been subsidized to one degree or another.
Koplow says that because the value of these subsidies often exceeded the value of the power produced, “buying power on the open market and giving it away for free would have been less costly than subsidizing the construction and operation of nuclear power plants.”
One of the most important gifts to the nuclear industry is the pass on financial responsibility for a serious accident. This was legislated during the Cold War in the Price-Anderson Act of 1957. In fact, without this protection, it’s highly unlikely the commercial nuclear power industry could or would exist.
In a recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists arguing for the end of Price-Anderson, nuclear industry economic analyst Mark Cooper points out that 50 years ago General Electric and Westinghouse, the two largest reactor manufacturers, said they wouldn’t build reactors without it.
Although Price-Anderson was initially rationalized (along with many of the other subsidies) as necessary protection to help get the fledgling industry going, Congress has repeatedly renewed it over the years.
Today, reactor owners have to carry a small amount of private insurance, and Price-Anderson creates an industry-wide pool currently valued at around $12 billion. Accounting for inflation, Cooper puts the estimated costs of Chernobyl in excess of $600 billion. In Japan, the Fukushima accident is projected to cost up to $250 billion (though it could well be more). Here in the U.S., Cooper says, a serious accident at, say, Indian Point, just 35 miles north of Manhattan, could cost as much as $1.5 trillion.
If such an accident were to happen in the U.S., taxpayers would be left with the tab for the difference.
But even with all of the subsidies, the cost of building a new reactor—pegged at between $6 billion and $12 billion apiece—is still so expensive that reactors only get built with substantial government help.
To jumpstart a new round of nuclear construction, the Obama administration is trying to offer $54.5 billion in loan guarantees (only $18.5 billion is actually authorized by Congress). This means that if a project is delayed or cancelled for some reason—including for concerns over safety—taxpayers pick up the tab for that delay or cancellation.
Although the U.S. Department of Energy is expected to approve $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for the two new reactors at the Vogtle plant in Georgia any day now, significant concerns remain over the lack of transparency regarding the federal loan guarantees.
Besides the massive federal subsidies, the nuclear industry has also succeeded in getting three states so far, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, to pass legislation mandating “advanced cost recovery.” This allows nuclear utilities to collect the cost of building a reactor from their customers before it is built.
Advanced cost recovery programs have existed in the past, but Morgan Pinnell, Safe Energy Program coordinator at Physicians for Social Responsibility, says the new ones the nuclear industry is pushing are particularly irresponsible from a public-interest point of view.
For example, in December 2011, a resolution was offered to the St. Petersburg City Council to repeal the 2006 legislation, F.S. 366.93, citing, among other things, that the two reactors that Progress Energy proposed for Levy County would raise Progress Energy customers’ bills more than $60 a month. Even if the reactors are never built, it’s not clear whether the utility would have to pay the money back.
Are Nukes Green?
Back in the 1980s, when nuclear power was widely considered a pariah, growing concern about global warming in government circles provided an opportunity for the beleaguered industry. Since it was recognized that nuclear power plants, unlike coal plants, did not produce carbon emissions when generating electricity, the UN International Atomic Energy Agency and some policymakers began to promote nuclear energy as a necessary power source in a warming world.
By the early nineties, the nuclear industry began casting itself as the clean, green “fresh air” energy source, a description that goes unchallenged in today’s mainstream media. Towing this line, Frontline’s Nuclear Aftershocks argues that nuclear power is needed to combat climate change.
It bears asking how true, or even realistic, this claim is. In order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of global warming, many climate scientists have been saying for at least the better part of a decade that by 2050 humanity needs to reduce global carbon emissions 80 percent from what was emitted in 2000.
An MIT task force report, The Future of Nuclear Power, written ostensibly to figure out how to do that, calls for 1,000 to 1,500 thousand-megawatts electric (MWe) capacity reactors to be up and running by 2050 to increase the share of nuclear-generated electricity from 20 percent to 30 percent in the U.S. and 17 percent to 20 percent globally. (Currently there are 435 reactors operating in the world and 104 at 60 different locations in the U.S.)
The first page of the executive summary of the report says that such a deployment would “avoid 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon emissions from coal plants, about 25 percent of the increment in a business-as-usual scenario.”
But displacement of 25 percent of the expected growth in carbon emissions does not square with the need to cut emissions by 80 percent by 2050. That aside, the 2009 update of the report notes that progress on building new reactors has been slow, both globally and in the U.S.
The 2003 report reveals another hitch in this plan: in order to deal with the nuclear waste from that many new reactors, an underground repository the size of the highly controversial and cancelled Yucca Mountain would have to be built somewhere in the world every four years. It bears noting that we are in the sixth decade since commercial nuclear power generation began and not one permanent repository has been completed anywhere in the world.
Some people are calling for fuel reprocessing, which takes spent nuclear fuel and uses a chemical process to extract plutonium and uranium to make more nuclear fuel. Aside from the fact that reprocessing wouldn’t actually reduce the volume of spent nuclear fuel very much, it’s dangerous, expensive, and irresponsibly polluting (the West Valley reprocessing plant in Western New York, which ran for six years between 1966 and 1972, is still a huge toxic mess).
Reprocessing also creates lots of weapons-grade plutonium that can be made into atomic bombs, a feature that one might question in our increasingly tense and politically unstable world.
Other nuclear enthusiasts see a magic bullet in thorium reactors, but according to a 2009 Department of Energy study, “the choice between uranium-based fuel and thorium-based fuels is seen basically as one of preference, with no fundamental difference in addressing the nuclear power issues.”
One specific design, the “liquid fluoride thorium reactor, or LFTR (pronounced “lifter”) has attained cult status as a “new, green nuke” that its promoters say will produce a virtually endless supply of electricity that is “too cheap to meter” in “meltdown proof” reactors, creating miniscule quantities of much shorter-lived waste that is impossible to refashion into nuclear bombs.
But critics say these claims are fiction. Thorium technology is significantly more expensive than the already exorbitant uranium-fueled reactors, so there are serious doubts it could ever be commercially viable without much higher subsidies than the nuclear industry already receives.
There are also serious safety concerns with reactors that run on liquid fuel comprised of hot, molten salt, as the LFTR design does.
Ed Lyman, senior scientist in the Global Security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says a small prototype of the LFTR that operated at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s remains “one of the most technically challenging cleanup problems that Oak Ridge faces.”
Nukes in a Warming World
The need for nuclear power has been sold to the public as a way to prevent the existential threat of catastrophic climate change. But that argument can be turned the other way. In a world of increasingly extreme weather events, we need to question the wisdom of having more potential sources of widespread, deadly radiological contamination that could be overwhelmed by some Fukushima-style natural disaster.
In a presentation to the San Clemente City Council, home of the troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant, which is right on the Pacific Ocean halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen points out that U.S. nuclear plants are designed to meet whatever industry designers think Mother Nature is expected to throw at them. This requirement—their “design basis”—is found in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 10 CFR Part 50, Appendix A, No. 2.
Different locations have different risks, so the requirements for plants vary. For example, nuclear plants in California are designed to be able to withstand stronger earthquakes than, say, the reactor in Vermont. Likewise, plants built in Florida are designed to handle more severe hurricanes than plants in upstate New York.
The requirements are set for a one-in-a-thousand year event. Considering that four events exceeded the design basis of nuclear reactors in the past year—the 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake in Japan, the tsunami that followed, the flooding of the Missouri River around the Ft. Calhoun nuclear plant in Nebraska, and the 5.8 earthquake centered near the North Anna plant in Virginia (two of which resulted in disaster)—how confident can we be that either nuclear operators or the NRC have anticipated the worst nature can throw at us?
Using the thousand-year scenario, Gundersen points out that for any one reactor running for 60 years, there’s a 6 percent chance that it will see an event as bad as or worse than what it was designed for. Multiplying that 6 percent by the 60 nuclear plant locations bumps it up to a 360 percent chance.
“In other words,” Gundersen says, “it’s a near certainty that some plant in the U.S. over its lifetime will experience an event worse than designers had anticipated. As a matter of fact, it’s more like three or four plants…”
As the impacts from global warming worsen, the risks will undoubtedly increase.
Consider that 2011 broke all records for billion-dollar weather disasters in the U.S. AP science writer Seth Borenstein recently described it this way: “With an almost biblical onslaught of twisters, floods, snow, drought, heat and wildfire, the U.S. in 2011 has seen more weather catastrophes that caused at least $1 billion in damage than it did in all of the 1980s, even after the dollar figures from back then are adjusted for inflation.”
But it wasn’t just the U.S.: 2011 also saw record-breaking extremes all over the world throughout the year. Ross Gelbspan, whose 1997 book The Heat is On chronicled the fossil fuel lobby’s remarkably successful campaign to deceive the public and derail any action to address global climate destabilization, catalogues a hefty list of meteorological calamities from floods, torrential rains and massive mudslides, colossal snowstorms, ripping windstorms, and tornadoes to withering heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires here and here.
With or without nuclear power, the escalation of global warming isn’t likely to slow any time soon. Though a recent discovery of the effectiveness of polyethylemimine at capturing CO2 sounds promising (researchers say it sequesters carbon at large industrial sources, small individual sources like car exhausts, and can even pull it directly from the air), it remains to be seen how quickly scrubbers from this material can be manufactured and deployed and how well they will actually work.
In any case, fossil fuel companies are doubling down on their pursuit of “unconventional” fossil fuels like natural gas from shale, coalbed methane, and tight gas sands (fracking), and oil from deepwater wells and tar sands—all in all, the dirtiest (in terms of greenhouse gas and other pollution), riskiest, and most energy-intensive sources.
And in the absence of policies to reduce greenhouse gases, the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s International Energy Outlook 2011 projects global coal use to rise 50 percent between 2008 and 2035 from 139 quadrillion Btu to 209 quadrillion Btu.
Despite the increasing urgency to tackle global warming, the most recent global climate talks in Durban failed to reach agreement on extending the Kyoto Protocol, which laid out the world’s only legally binding (but subsequently ignored) carbon emissions reductions.
It’s time to reexamine a lot of the assumptions that lurk beneath the nuclear-power-is-necessary-to-deal-with-climate-change narrative. There was no mention in Frontline’s Nuclear Aftershocks program or any other mainstream media that I have seen about the big elephant in the room: the voracious energy-gobbling economy—which creates the need for enormous, centralized power sources—that’s making the planet (and us) sick.
When junk-food addicted smokers get diabetes, cancer, heart disease, or any number of other maladies considered “lifestyle diseases,” the admonishment that they need to change their lifestyle is typically accepted without question.
We would do well to start applying that same logic to the way our societies use energy and the kind of economy such energy use powers, rather than blindly accept the Hobson’s choice of either turning the Earth into Venus because of global warming or poisoning large swaths of it with radioactivity.
Graphics: Dave Channon
First, Republicans opposed extending the payroll tax cut that put an extra $20 a week in the pockets of 160 million working Americans.
Next, they supported it. If the cost were offset the way they wanted. Even though Republicans previously had said that tax cuts never need be offset.
After that, they opposed a stopgap measure extending the break by two months. Even though the cost was offset.
Ultimately, they approved the 60-day extension.
Then, they opposed extending the tax cut another 10 months. Unless the cost were offset.
Finally, however, they supported that. Even though the cost was not, in fact, offset.
What’s that sound? It’s the frantic flailing of a grounded GOP fish: flip flop, flip flop, flip flop.
Republicans revel in casting themselves as the principled party. They claim they’re the moral majority. Their values, they contend, are unshakable. So their serial waffling on this issue is confusing. Against it; for it; against it; for it. Isn’t that what they ridiculed a Democratic Presidential candidate for?
There’s a simple explanation, however. Throughout this entire episode, Republicans never wavered or vacillated or faltered in any way in performing their most vital, their most basic function as a political party: pandering to the rich.
The thread running through this drama, from beginning to end, is Republican opposition to equitably taxing the rich. The GOP did whatever it took to prevent the nation’s millionaires and billionaires from parting with another cent. In the end, the party’s public image took a beating. But Congressional Republicans triumphed in shielding the nation’s richest from paying their fair share.
So focused are Republicans on providing welfare for the rich in the form of special tax breaks and perks that initially the party didn’t support extending the payroll tax cut for the middle class at all. Late last November, party leaders, including U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, announced they opposed a one-year expansion. Republicans said they’d allow a temporary tax cut for the middle class to expire, no problem, even though they’d previously contended they couldn’t end the supposedly temporary income tax cut Bush gave the rich because that would be a “tax increase,” and they could never support a tax increase. Not ever.
For Republicans, who are so true-blue to blue bloods, the real problem with extending the payroll tax cut for the middle class was that Democrats proposed paying for it with a small surtax on the nation’s wealthiest.
That confronted the GOP with a choice: side with the rich or go with the middle class. This was hardly a Sophie’s Choice, however. It was no difficult decision for the average American, say one of the 160 million for whom the extra $1,000 a year from the payroll tax break is meaningful.
Despite that, the GOP sided with 350,000 millionaires and billionaires. Republicans worked to ensure those millionaires and billionaires would not have to pay an additional amount insignificant to the 1 percent individually, but collectively substantial to the federal budget.
Within days of Kyl’s assertion that the GOP opposed adding a year to the payroll tax cut, Republicans changed their minds. They would go for the extension, they said, if the cost were offset not by taxing the rich but instead by freezing the wages of federal workers for a third year in a row and eliminating the jobs of 210,000 of them.
Their logic was straightforward – if the middle class were to get a break, then the middle class would pay for it.
Democrats, and the vast majority of Americans, disagreed.
Stymied on a year-long deal, the two parties arranged a two-month reduction, the cost of which was offset. Even so, House Republicans rejected it. Before they accepted it.
At the time, Republican U.S. House Speaker John Boehner said Americans could “take to the bank the fact that” a payroll tax cut extension for 10 additional months “will be paid for.”
Seventy-eight days later, Boehner and his Republican crew agreed to extend the tax break without an offset.
Never mind, then.
In a presidential election year, Boehner & Co. surrendered to a simple calculus: the 99 percent has something that the 1 percent doesn’t – more votes. Way more. And polls show American opinion is just the opposite of Republican position on these issues. Americans strongly support raising taxes on the rich, while they strongly oppose ending the payroll tax cut for the 99 percent.
The GOP was cornered. If it wanted to win elections, it must appease the 99 percent. If it wanted to remain true to its core values – pandering to the rich – it must refuse a surtax on the 1 percent.
So Republicans flip flopped on the easier issue – appeasing the unwashed masses. Have your payroll tax break extension, damn it.
Unfortunately for the GOP, the masses may be unwashed, but they’re not unwise. This time last year, 63 percent disapproved of Congressional Republicans; by January, 75 percent disapproved of the GOP.
There’s just something so unappealing about a flip flopper. But as U.S. Sen. John Kerry can tell you, Republicans know that.
Written by Amanda Marcotte for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Research and common sense both tell us that mandatory ultrasounds cannot be what proponents claim they are, a harmless attempt to impart information to a woman to help with her decision on abortion. Research shows that women don’t change their minds after viewing an ultrasound, but go ahead with the abortion anyway. Common sense should tell you why. The only real way that an ultrasound imparts information is if a woman doesn’t know she’s pregnant. But women don’t seek abortions unless they’re pregnant. At most, ultrasounds tend to show women seeking abortions that the embryo/fetus is smaller and less formed than they’ve probably been led to believe. Except for the thoughtless and the dim, it’s clear that mandatory ultrasounds therefore cannot have anything to do with giving information, much less convincing women not to have abortions.
So what is it about, then? Pro-choicers have long figured it was a matter of putting up more obstacles for women who have abortions, but mostly it’s about punishment. Since they can’t ban abortion outright and therefore jail or at least fine women who have them, anti-choicers instead will write disingenuous laws that dish out punishment in the guise of concern. It’s the modern day version of putting someone in the stocks, shaming someone as punishment. Except the Puritans at least waited until after you did the forbidden thing; conservatives are going to get you for even thinking about it.
What’s been fascinating about the uproar over the Virginia legislature passing a mandatory ultrasound is that conservatives are basically admitting that it’s about punishing women for seeking out an entirely legal abortion, a backdoor way of making the legal illegal by introducing mandatory punishments. It’s part of this month’s larger spasm of honesty about the misogyny underlying anti-choice activism, a spasm that seems impervious to Republican party attempts to get it under control.
Cross-posted from Tikkun Daily.
Israel’s system of military justice – the complex and suffocating legal framework which has governed Palestinians in the Occupied Territories for decades – has been largely invisible to the outside world, including to many Israelis. However, a confluence of events in the past month is illuminating on a grand scale this cruel and repressive legal system that has dominated the lives of Palestinians for far too long.
Last month, a piercing documentary by Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz – The Law in These Parts- won the 2012 World Cinema Grand Jury Documentary Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The film forces former IDF officials and judges to wrestle with the inherent injustices they helped create in forming Israel’s military justice system – including the practices of indefinite detention, land confiscation for settlements and the use of torture in interrogations. The Law in These Parts, and the prestigious award it garnered, helped spark conversations in Israel and abroad about the legal system which enables Israel’s occupation.
However, it has been the hunger strike of a Palestinian baker, Khader Adnan, that has dramatically illuminated Israel’s inhumane practice of indefinite detention as mainstream media organizations in the U.S. and abroad heighten its scrutiny.
Adnan, who as of this writing is entering the 65th day of his hunger strike, and who is, according Physicians for Human Rights, in immediate danger of death, was arrested two months ago and accused of being associated with Islamic Jihad. However, no charges have been filed against Adnan, and Israel has refused to say what, if any, evidence it has against him.
The situation, unfortunately, is a normative one, for in Israel’s system of military justice, Palestinians can be detained for indefinite periods without either a charge or access to the military’s evidence, making defending such detainees nearly impossible.
Adnan began his hunger strike to protest the inhumane and humiliating treatment he received after being detained without charge, and his dangerous act of civil disobedience has both inspired Palestinians and increased attention on the issue of Israel’s military court system.
As CNN reports:
Adnan’s hunger strike has become a rallying cry for Palestinians, who have staged multiple protests in the West Bank and Gaza demanding his release. Protesters have also launched a social media campaign to shed light on Israel’s administrative detentions.
“This is a violation of every aspect of human rights,” Palestinian legislator and human rights activist Mustafa Barghouti said during a recent West Bank rally.
“What Khader Adnan is doing today is to show the will of freedom even it means the loss of life.”
The high-profile hunger strike has sparked criticism from rights groups, which have called on Israeli authorities to either charge or release him.
In the wake of Adnan’s hunger strike, media outlets are suddenly devoting resources to additional (and disturbing) narratives produced by Israel’s system of injustice. This includes a profile in The New York Times yesterday on Islam Dar Ayyoub, one of thousands of minors who have been seized, detained and interrogated for rock-throwing without their parents, a lawyer or another adult present.
The Times’ piece begins:
A year ago, Islam Dar Ayyoub was a sociable ninth grader and a good student, according to his father, Saleh, a Palestinian laborer in this small village near Ramallah.
Then, one night in January 2011, about 20 Israeli soldiers surrounded the dilapidated Dar Ayyoub home and pounded vigorously on the door. Islam, who was 14 at the time, said he thought they had come for his older brother. Instead, they had come for him. He was blindfolded, handcuffed and whisked away in a jeep.
From that moment, Islam’s childhood was over. Catapulted into the Israeli military justice system, an arm of Israel’s 44-year-old occupation of the West Bank, Islam became embroiled in a legal process as challenging and perplexing as the world in which he has grown up. The young man was interrogated and pressed to inform on his relatives, neighbors and friends.
The article’s author, Isabel Kershner, goes on to note that Adnan’s hunger strike has focused attention on this system of military detention in Israel, as though implicitly admitting why it is she’s now focused her pen on Islam’s story. Concerning Islam, she also notes the following:
Islam was taken to a nearby army base where, his lawyer said, he was left out in the cold for hours. In the morning, he was taken to the Israeli police for interrogation. Accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers inside the village, he was encouraged to identify other youths and the adult organizers of weekly protests here.
In a police videotape of Islam’s five-hour interrogation, the teenager is at times visibly exhausted. Alone and denied access to a lawyer for most of the period, he was partially cautioned three times about his rights but was never told directly that he had the right to remain silent.
As the human rights organization, B’Tselem, reported this year, such youth have no chance in Israel’s military court system. Of the 853 minors charged with rock-throwing between 2005-2010, only one was acquitted (a conviction rate of 99.8 percent), and 15 percent of those minors arrested served prison sentences of over six months.
These are the types of statistics which, for too long, have remained invisible. They tell the story of a military court system, picked apart in The Law in These Parts, that has for four decades placed the value of order over the value of justice. And they tell the story of a man whose life hangs in the balance in Adnan.
They are stories. Stories once invisible. Stories once whispered on the streets of Jerusalem and shouted in the streets of Ramallah. They are stories that are now being heard by citizens across the globe.
They are stories that must be told.
§
Follow the author – David Harris-Gershon – on Twitter @David_EHG.
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Two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight and a third are obese, but few diet drugs have been able to make a dent in what is rapidly becoming our “gross national product.” Diet drugs have proved ineffective or dangerous or ineffective and dangerous. The popular Fen Phen was withdrawn almost fifteen years ago for killing at least 120 people. Meridia, another popular diet drug, was withdrawn in 2010 for increasing the incidence of cardiovascular events in patients.
Other diet drugs remain on the market but have unpleasant side effects. Alli and Xenical encourage weight loss by blocking the body’s absorption of fat but can cause “oily bowels” and “anal leakage.” Comics had a lot of fun with them when they were first approved with lines like “With Allies Like This, Who Needs Enemas?” and “Free coupon for Depends.”
In 2010, the FDA failed to approve three diet drug candidates: Contrave, a drug that includes Wellbutrin, an antidepressant that lacks the weight gain side effects associated with other antidepressants; Lorcaserin, which also includes an antidepressant-like drug; and Qnexa, which combines topiramate, an epilepsy drug patented as Topamax, and phentermine, the phen in Fen Phen.
Next week the FDA will reconsider Qnexa. Two years ago, an FDA advisory committee heard patient Erin Aycock testify that she lost 50 pounds on Qnexa. Others patients, on the drug-rating site askapatient.com, say they lost 10 percent of their body weight on Topamax but also sometimes lost their memory and hair too. Oops. (In fact Topamax’ tendency to dumb people down is so well known it is referred to as “Stupamax” in the military where it is in wide use.) Qnexa’s weight loss properties may stem from topiramate’s penchant for making food and beverages tastes bad, a side effect scores of users on askapatient cite. In 2009, the drug also received an FDA suicide warning (along with other seizure drugs) and in 2011, it received a warning that it may cause birth defects.
And phentermine the other drug in Qnexa? “I honestly can’t distinguish this drug from Adderall, or even cocaine,” says one phentermine user. “It might as well be called Prescription Coke.” Users report losing 50 and 60 pounds on phentermine, though many say they gained it back. Phentermine users also report being unable to sleep and chewing the insides of their cheeks as if they were chewing gum–a frequent side effect of “speed.” Phentermine is the half of Fen Phen that remains on the market.
After hearing testimony in 2010, the FDA advisory committee voted ten to six against approving Qnexa because of concerns about depression, memory loss, birth defects and lack of long term data. Since then, both the drug’s safety profile and national obesity have worsened. Will opinions have changed given that both the drug’s good and bad features sound a lot like Fen Phen’s?
Rethinking Climate Change: “Your Environmental Road Trip” Film Inspires Audiences Across the Country
When Your Environmental Road Trip documentary screens at the Big Sky Film Festival in Missoula, Montana on Monday, February 20, producer Mark Dixon and director Ben Evans should be carting a trunkload of well-deserved national and international awards in their beloved “Rachel Car,” the Ford Escape Hybrid that traversed the nation in the YERT trio’s breakthrough cinematic adventure.
But that wouldn’t be the style of the Fellini trio of the climate justice movement, whose streamlined life style and journey included carting their own garbage in their car for an entire year.
Instead, casting off their successful careers and old consumer ways, as well as any heavy political baggage and mind-numbing works of policy wonks, the YERT film crew has managed to pull off the impossible in the world of cinema: A deeply absorbing and often hilarious road trip that confronts the badlands of our nation’s spiraling descent into dirty energy darkness, only to emerge along the solar roadways and wind-swept plains into the myriad possibilities for new power and sustainable living.
Within days of their departure in Pennsylvania, literally arriving at the dead-end of abandoned roads in the inferno coalfields of Centralia, Your Environmental Road Trip quickly diverts from the enduring but increasingly clichéd images of many environmental films and embarks on a groundbreaking 50-state parable for the possible with the verve and chutzpah of new world explorers.
Stunningly refreshing, unaffected and informed, Your Environmental Road Trip makes a critical leap beyond all of the climate change and dirty energy catastrophe film masterpieces in circulation — most notably, of course, Al Gore’s Oscar-winning epic, An Inconvenient Truth — by presenting climate destabilization issues through the down-home visions and ordinary efforts of unabashedly optimistic and incorrigibly determined innovators and sustainable community endeavors.
If you had to select one film to show your climate change-denying brother-in-law or equivocating religious or community group or indifferent college student or distracted kid, YERT should go to the head of your queue.
To be sure, the YERT film team — led by former engineer Dixon and Off Broadway performers and veteran actors Julie Dingman Evans and Ben Evans — is no stumbling act of innocents. Vowing to keep to a rigorous low impact lifestyle on the road, the filmmakers set off to interview some of the most important voices in the environmental and sustainable living movements today, including Bill McKibben and Wes Jackson. The crew’s infectious drive lends an almost exuberant air to their often difficult journey, as the YERT team attempts to go “beyond hope,” as one philosopher tells them at the Green Festival in San Francisco, and seek efforts that are “independent of hope and despair, and totally creative.”
While the film is at its best when it focuses on energy and food production and consumption, YERT transcends any glib answers or simplistic blueprints and investigates changing lifestyles and community planning choices. From a “living roof” atop Chicago skyscrapers or the Ford factory in Michigan, to traditional Native American mud huts in Nebraska, cave dwellings in Idaho and pioneering carbon-free “Earthships” in New Mexico, the film looks at efforts to transition from devastating fossil fuel operations and reckless consumption to more sustainable ways of living.
Standing on the edge of a massive mountaintop removal strip mining site at Kayford Mountain, West Virginia, celebrated activist Larry Gibson warns them to “use your anger to get over your fear and change it. Because you’re the only one who can.”
In fact, YERTunfolds into an increasingly clearer vision that the environmental movement must shift from an agenda on doing “less harm” to taking effective and immediate actions that are restorative and regenerative.
While you “don’t have to be a hippie to live in sustainable villages,” as Julie notes, YERT asks the viewer to “rethink community, rethink economics, security… including the environmental and health concerns.”
Such rethinking comes from the dusty soil of innovators like Joel Salatin, a long-time farmer and livestock pioneer in Virginia, who dazzles his cows and chickens and pigs in carbon sequestration techniques, or the Idaho laboratory of brilliant Solar Roads inventor Scott Brusaw, who calmly discusses his mind-boggling plans to turn the nation’s highways and roads into the ultimate grid to collect and generate power.
It all hits home for the YERT trio, when Julie finds out she is pregnant three months into the cross-country journey.
Deeply rooted in his prairie lands, the venerable Wes Jackson of the Land Institute calls for any wanderlust for innovations to eventually get back home: “I’m not going to leave here,” he says, looking at his fields and river in Kansas. The only way to save America, and the planet, he concludes, is a profound “affection for place.” That place, of course, is not only your home, but the planet itself.
By the dramatic end — or birth, rather — of Your Environmental Road Trip, audiences will not only cheer, but feel compelled to spring to their feet to make their own journey and join an inspiring movement for change, through their own affection for place and home.
If only our nation’s policymakers will watch this important film and do the same.
Here’s the trailer:
By Russ Baker on Feb 17, 2012 originally posted on WhoWhatWhy.com
Recently, we expressed concerns about Twitter’s newly announced policy to retroactively delete tweets that violate laws in particular countries. At the time, we hadn’t been able to fully digest what was going on. Here arefurther thoughts—and some more questions.***
In Twitter’s disturbingly brief and blandannouncement post, they mentioned “retroactively withholding” tweets in countries “when required to do so in response to what we believe to be a valid and applicable legal request.”
Twitter stressed that it would not delete the tweets outside the country involved, and would also announce the act of censorship. It insisted that this “granular” approach was preferable to blacking out messages to the entire world (though it doesn’t seem clear that they’ve ever actually done that). At best, the granular approach does benefit secondary audiences, but is of no consolation to those who lose their voices while perhaps advocating for just causes like liberty or human rights to their own fellow citizens.
What exactly does retroactive withholding mean? Further study showed that they meant they would not filter tweets as they are posted. Instead, they will, upon receiving complaints, block them in such a way that after that point no one in the complaining country could read the offending posts.
Assuming that authoritarian, totalitarian and just way-too-sensitive governments are monitoring all tweets from certain people or those with certain keywords, the complaints could theoretically be almost instantaneous. If Twitter places a priority on pleasing the governments in these countries, then the deletion of those tweets could also come fast, before too many people had seen them or perhaps even retweeted them. Twitter presumably has a way to block not only the tweets, but also straight retweets from others, and even tweets with comments added.
This all will be being watched closely in authoritarian places like Saudi Arabia, which as we previously noted, recently bought a sizable stake in Twitter via its wealthiest prince, with the company insisting—of course—that this was strictly business. Nothing to do with the censorship announcement.
What You Calling “Valid”?
As in most things, the details are all-important.
What constitutes “a valid legal request” to quash a tweet? Isn’t saying anything against the existing government illegal in many countries? And if so, isn’t Twitter just enabling oppression and illegitimate governments? And what about comments regarding rich and powerful individuals, companies and entities? If these interests can get a judge in a particular country to label something illegal, isn’t that all that’s needed for a “valid” request? Does Twitter have a lot of confidence in the purity of legal systems worldwide, in the efficacy of democracy everywhere?
Who decides what is or should be “illegal”? Each government? So as soon as there is a coup in a country and a different faction comes into power, then that faction sets the new Twitter policy?
Twitter has cited as an example that neo-Nazi statements, Holocaust denial, and so forth, are illegal in Germany and so Twitter seeks to comply with that. Is Twitter comparing hate speech of that magnitude, on which Germany has particular sensitivity with regard to its own history, with tweets that advocate for democracy in places where there is none?
Censorship Goes Viral?
Is Twitter concerned about a slippery slope here, where this could turn into an avalanche of censorship? Here are just a few examples of recent censorship requests: In India, a nonprofit seeking to test the situation sent in a bunch of deliberately frivolous complaints, and got posts removed fast. These were Web postings, not tweets, and the Indian government did so directly. But what if they had been tweets, and the Indian government had turned to Twitter? Presumably the same censorship would have occurred—if the government there deemed the posts “illegal.”
A Saudi writer had to flee his country after several tweets that were deemed apostasyput him under a potential death sentence. In a theocratically-dominated society like that, these tweets would be deemed “illegal” under Twitter’s criteria. Would Twitter then censor tweets that express controversial religious views, or that take a new or fresh approach to some official position?
Where else is this policy going to take us? In Brazil, they want to ban tweets that alert drivers to speed traps. In South Korea, a young man faces up to seven years in prisonfor retweeting something coming from the North Koreans—even though he was simply mocking the North. Is that then Twitter’s policy—to let South Korea dictate whether humor is ok? Where does Twitter see this all ending?
A One-Way Tweet?
We wanted to ask them about all this, so we went to their media inquiry website, and requested an interview.
The site says that they will get back to members of the media “in a few days.” Huh! For an instant-communication service, they sure don’t take some communications with much urgency. And after we posted our request, we got an email saying:
Thanks for your inquiry. We are a small communications team based in San Francisco and are quite busy. We’ll get back to you if we’re able to.
“…if we’re able to [!]
They may be a “small communications team,” but how responsible is that for a giant company that impacts the whole world? Outfits that are serious about fostering accurate information (or just protecting their corporate image) have a decent sized media team, and are capable of responding quickly.
This raises another question. Why is their “communications team” so small—can’t a company with a valuation of billions of dollars and eager investors spend more on this? Is this a deliberate tactic to stonewall legitimate questions? How else to explain it?
Twitter doesn’t seem to have yet begun withholding tweets. So perhaps the announcement is just a trial balloon, to see what kind of public outcry results. So far that seems very muted. Maybe the “limited capacity” of the company to handle press inquiries is no coincidence. In any case, this might be a good moment for those a sustained interest in Internet freedom to let Twitter know—in a sustained way.
Graphic by Peter Kuper—www.peterkuper.com
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