Don’t worry about climate change, energy scarcity, poverty, and environmental threats. Be happy.

Fossil fuels and fossil fuel companies are here to save the day!

That’s what ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson told his June 27, 2012 audience in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Tillerson insisted that if you’re worried about climate change, energy scarcity, poverty, and the impact of drilling for oil and natural gas in environmentally-sensitive areas, well you’re just “illiterate” in science and math and engineering, or the victim of a “lazy” press” that likes to scare the public, or you’ve succumbed to the blandishments of the environmental and climate change groups that “manufacture fear.”

The truth, according to ExxonMobil, is that fossil fuels are the best thing that could happen to the planet and to humanity.

Climate Change

Unlike some of his fellow fossil fuel CEOs, Tillerson acknowledged that global warming is real, that it’s happening, but he insisted that its impact has been “overblown” by scientists. Rather than trying to slow or even prevent climate change by eliminating fossil fuel use, he says, we should focus instead on adapting to the changing weather and rising seas.

Clearly, the health, profits, and well-being of Exxon and its brethren are vastly more important than the human race or the planet. We are fools to waste our time and money implementing alternatives to fossil fuel energy, because global warming, claims Tillerson, is nothing to worry about. “We have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution.”

Poverty

Insisting that global poverty and the billions of people without access to energy are much more pressing issues than climate change, Tillerson had the solution to those issues: oil and gas supplies. And, he said, the billions of poor want that solution now.

“They’d love to burn fossil fuels because their quality of life would rise immeasurably,” Tillerson said. Even better, “You’d save millions upon millions of lives by making fossil fuels available to parts of the world that don’t have it” rather than, say, providing solar and wind power.

Energy Independence

Tillerson also insisted that national energy independence is not only not necessary, efforts to achieve energy independence are misguided. As long as we have energy security—secure access to energy, be it home grown or imported—we’ll be fine, and Tillerson insisted that our access to energy is in no danger. “No one, anywhere, any place in the world has not been able to get crude oil to fuel their economies,” he said.

And now that the ice is melting thanks to global warming and we have access to all of those billions of gallons of petroleum beneath the Arctic Ocean, we won’t be running out of crude oil any time soon.

Drilling

Finally, when it comes to oil drilling, natural gas drilling, and shale drilling (“fracking”), Tillerson asserts that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Certainly, there will always be spills and accidents, he said, but the energy that fossil fuel generates is more than worth those little problems. The biggest challenge to the fossil fuel industry, he said, is “taking an illiterate public and try[ing] to help them understand why we can manage these risks.”

Clearly, even though it took three months for BP to cap the crude oil gushing at 53,000 barrels a day into the Gulf of Mexico from the damaged Deepwater Horizon sea floor oil well, environmentally-sensitive regions with oil and natural gas deposits have nothing to worry about.

To overcome climate change, we need to unite as human beings. We need to bring together millions of people, thousands of communities, and hundreds of countries. How can you help? By donating your time and your ideas to help protect the planet and humanity:

 1.- Share this article with other people.   

 2.-  Send me an email to participate in establishing an educational farm, where you will learn
  and teach others.  Email me at: fliz@savingaplanteatrisk.org

 3.- Write a comment below so that other can see your position about this affair situation.

Author Bio: Frank Liz is a futurist, entrepreneur, and the author of the forthcoming book Starving For Answers: How Climate Change, Ignorance, and Greed Are Creating a Century of Hunger . . . and What We Can Do About It Now.

When people, pundits, politicians, and even scientists speak of climate change they almost never mention the fact that climate change greatly increases the risk of a nuclear disaster, not some far off event that will affect us someday like a Hollywood version of a global apocalypse, but today.

Now, more than ever, knowledge is power. The more we know, the better prepared we can be to hopefully minimize the wide-ranging threats climate change poses to our nuclear power plants.

Three Disasters

Thus far, the world has endured three civil nuclear disasters: Three Mile Island in 1979 (a partial nuclear meltdown), Chernobyl in 1986 (a reactor explosion and fire), and Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi in 2011.

The Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters were caused by human error. Fukushima Daiichi was caused by an earthquake and a 30-foot tsunami that swept over the plant and destroyed, among other things, its back-up power system, which meant the plant had no means of keeping the reactors cool and preventing a meltdown.

A recent study found that Chernobyl is responsible for one million human deaths, with more coming.

The long-term death count is expected to be higher from Fukushima Daiichi which, despite the Japanese government’s claims to the contrary, is far from stable. It is, according to one commentator, an ongoing and worsening disaster.

As recently as April 5, 2012, more than a year after the earthquake and tsunami, the plant leaked 12 tons of radioactive water into the ocean over a 30 minute time span. That’s in addition to a March 26, 2012 leak and the 10,000 tons of low-level radioactive water deliberately discharged into the ocean in 2011.

In early April 2012, workers took radiation, temperature, and water level readings at Reactor No. 2. They expected to find 33 feet of water. They found 2 feet of water. That’s not enough to keep the nuclear fuel rods cool or to shield the radiation emitted by those rods. The radiation level was at 79 sieverts, the highest since the initial accident, which is enough to kill a person in a matter of minutes. High radiation levels also kill most electronic equipment.

So, human beings can’t get into the reactor to fix the problems, because they’d die. And robots can’t get into the reactor to fix the problems, because they’d “die,” too. TEPCO, the plant’s owner says it will have to invent something entirely new to fix the problems. Until inspiration strikes, Reactor No. 2’s situation continues to worsen.

The bad news? Reactor No. 2 is in the best shape of the four reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Reactors No. 1 and No. 3 have even higher radiation levels. TEPCO has no idea what to do about them.

Four Near Disasters

It doesn’t take the one-two punch that laid waste to Fukushima Daiichi to cause a nuclear disaster. A single extreme weather event could do it and climate change is turning extreme weather events into the world’s new normal. A flood, hurricane, or tornado, which are increasingly common in the U.S., for example, could each cause a nuclear meltdown similar to that of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Nine of America’s 104 nuclear power plants were constructed within two miles of a coastline, putting them at immediate threat of cyclones/hurricanes, storm surges and flooding.

Hurricane Andrew, which decimated southern Florida in 1992, produced 175 mph winds and a 16-foot storm surge. Andrew destroyed the Turkey Point nuclear facility’s suppression system, stripped most of the outside cabling, spilled approximately 100,000 gallons of coolant, and disabled the external power system for five days. The backup power system, which survived, was the only means of cooling the reactors’ cores. If that system had been destroyed, as it was at Fukushima Daiichi. America could have had its second nuclear disaster.

Many nuclear power plants were built along rivers, which will be flooding more frequently and more violently in coming years. The Missouri River flood in the summer of 2011 came within 10 feet of breaching the floodwater defenses of the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant near Blair, Nebraska.

Tornadoes in 2011 disabled three Browns Ferry nuclear units in Athens, Alabama and cut the power to two of the Surry Power Station nuclear units in Surry, Virginia. If the backup systems had failed as they did at Fukushima Daiichi (these plants have a similar design), then within a few hours there would have been a meltdown and the airborne release of a radioactive plume.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) considers the close calls at Turkey Point, Fort Calhoun, Browns Ferry, and the Surry Power Station to be success stories. The plants continued to function. No meltdown occurred.

Actually, they were huge red flags warning us of just how great the risk is when we combine climate change with nuclear power plants.

“One thing we learned from the Fukushima disaster,” says meteorologist Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground website, “is that when you get an extreme natural disaster event, unexpected things can happen to your power plant because you’re subjecting it to things that are extreme. You can’t always prepare for every contingency. Unanticipated things are bound to happen.”

What Are Our Chances?

As reported in the Huffington Post, when the House Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations asked the NRC back in 1985, “What does the commission and NRC staff believe the likelihood of a severe core melt accident to be in the next twenty years for those reactors now operating and those expected to operate [in the U.S.] during that time?”

The NRC replied in writing: “In a population of 100 reactors operating over a period of 20 years, the crude cumulative probability of such an accident would be 45%” with an error factor “of about 10 above and below.”

Basically, the NRC gave the country a 50-50 chance of a severe nuclear meltdown.

As The Huffington Post noted: “These are not good odds for disaster.”

The odds are actually much worse, because the NRC made that prediction before anyone thought to take into account the high risk impact of climate change.

Lowering the Nuclear Threat

This century of climate change-fueled extreme weather events is not the time to be constructing more nuclear power plants. Following the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, Japan shut down all but one of its 54 nuclear power plants. It’s talking about reopening some of them, but the Japanese people and many in local government are balking.

Currently, Australia has no nuclear power plant. Austria, Sweden, Italy, Belgium, and Spain have phased out their nuclear power plants. Following the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, Germany shut down eight of its nuclear reactors permanently and vowed to close the rest by 2022. The last of Switzerland’s nuclear power plants is scheduled to shut down in 2034.

Fukushima Daiichi is more than ample proof that the world needs to turn its attention from nuclear power to renewable energy, which doesn’t threaten the lives of millions of people. If we have to get by with scheduled brown outs and black outs while new renewable energy sources are brought on line, so be it.

It is better to have no power for a little while than a nuclear disaster that will kill millions over the long-term.

Author Frank Liz is a futurist, an entrepreneur, and author of the “Starving for Answers. Liz speaks about future possibilities of planet, climate change and creating food shortages. He tells us that nearly one billion people ache with hunger and that ecoagriculture is the best way of ending hunger.

To overcome climate change, we need to unite as human beings. We need to bring together millions of people, thousands of communities, and hundreds of countries. How can you help? By donating your time and your ideas to help protect the planet and humanity:

 1.- Share this article with other people.   

 2.-  Send me an email to participate in establishing an educational farm, where you will learn
  and teach others.  Email me at: fliz@savingaplanteatrisk.org

 3.- Write a comment below so that other can see your position about this affair situation.

The news is full of stories about the terrible spread of hunger in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The news is not full of stories about the terrible spread of hunger in developed countries, which might lead people to assume that hunger is not an issue in, for example, North America or Europe.

But it is.

Among the 25 member nations of the European Union, 100 million people suffer from hunger.

In the U.S., which is the world’s largest agricultural producer and exporter, nearly 49 million people, 15 percent of the population, are food insecure. Of those, 16 million are children. In upscale Santa Barbara County, California, one-quarter of the children are food insecure. In recession-battered Zavala County, Texas, nearly one-half of the children are food insecure.

In the five boroughs of New York City, 3.3 million men, women, children, seniors, and people with disabilities are food insecure. Equally troubling, poor New Yorkers can’t afford to buy healthy food, like fresh produce. The can only afford fat-, sugar-, and salt-laden processed foods and fast foods, which is creating an epidemic of diabetes and obesity among the urban poor.

Then there is the other half of North America, seemingly quiet and peaceful and abundant Canada, where many politicians are insisting that hunger isn’t an issue for the 34 million people in their country.

But it is.

In May 2012, Olivier De Schutter, a Belgian human rights expert and the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food who is studying hunger issues in developed nations, issued a report claiming that 800,000 households (i.e., more than 2 million people) in the country are food insecure. He called food insecurity among Canada’s Aboriginal peoples a “desperate situation.”

“What I’ve seen in Canada is a system that presents barriers for the poor to access nutritious diets and that tolerates increased inequalities between rich and poor, and [between] Aboriginal [and] non-Aboriginal peoples,” he said in a follow-up press release. Adequate diets “have become too expensive for poor Canadians.”

Rather than going “Gosh, we really have a problem and we need to do something about it,” Canada’s Conservative politicians and administration were outraged, loudly dismissing De Schutter’s report in newspaper and television interviews.

Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird: “There are, what, 193 members of the U.N.? I think most Canadians would think that spending 11 days in Canada on this issue . . . his time would be better spent elsewhere.”

Canadian Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq: “I met with the individual this morning and found him to be an ill-informed, patronizing academic studying, once again, the aboriginal people, Inuit and Canada’s Arctic, from afar. I took the opportunity to educate him about Canada’s north and the aboriginal people who depend on the wildlife that they hunt every day for food security.”

In his report, De Schutter had pointed out that the country’s Nutrition North Canada program, which subsidizes retailers that serve remote communities so that they can offset transportation costs and provide reasonably-priced food to those communities, isn’t working. “The retail subsidy is not being fully passed on to the consumer,” De Schutter noted.

This was mild language for what has become a catastrophic problem throughout northern Canada, where traditional food supplies are dwindling rapidly (hunting is not providing daily food security) and retailers are charging prices that go far beyond exorbitant.

In Nunavut in far northern Canada, a province the size of Western Europe with a population of around 35,000 predominantly Inuit people struggling with low or nonexistent incomes, stores are charging $10.25 for green peppers, $19 for cranberry juice, $28 for a cabbage, $65 a pound for chicken, and $105 for 24 bottles of water (safe drinking water is a critical problem in Aboriginal communities).

Yes, those are real prices.

The stores know “we have no choice,” one Nunavut citizen told reporters. “They can just do what they want and we have no option.”

Some desperate citizens actually fly to Edmonton, Alberta to shop and fly home. The roundtrip cost is lower than if they had gone to Nunavut stores.

Nunavut retailers also stock most of their shelves with processed food, rather than healthy and nutritious food. It is cheaper to buy soft drinks than apple juice in Nunavut.

“Nutrition North was supposed to bring improvements to the availability of healthy foods in Nunavut. But we see the same unhealthy food being displayed and sold in our store,” Jakob Gearheard, Executive Director of the Ilisaqsivik Society in Clyde River, Nunavut, told reporters. With the Nutrition North program broken, “the bottom line is that healthy food is less accessible and more expensive than before.”

Ignored by the current Conservative administration, Nunavut citizens are beginning to fight back. They have launched a Facebook group called Feeding My Family (17,000 members and counting) which is helping to organize actions, like protests in front of convenience and food stores and calls for much greater access to healthy food at fair prices.

Similarly, a Change.org petition is being circulated to drum up action on food insecurity in Nunavut.

Author Frank Liz is a futurist, an entrepreneur, and author of the “Starving for Answers. Liz speaks about future possibilities of planet, climate change and creating food shortages. He tells us that nearly one billion people ache with hunger and that ecoagriculture is the best way of ending hunger.

 2.-  Send me an email to participate in establishing an educational farm, where you will learn
  and teach others.  Email me at: fliz@savingaplanteatrisk.org

 3.- Write a comment below so that other can see your position about this affair situation.

On May 18, 2012, President Barack Obama said something true: “We’ve seen how spikes in food prices can plunge millions into poverty, which, in turn, can spark riots that cost lives, and can lead to instability. Reducing malnutrition and hunger around the world advances international peace and security.”

In that same speech, President Obama also told a lie. He called the New Alliance for Food and Security and Nutrition, the G8’s new US$3 billion initiative to combat hunger in Africa, a “moral, economic, and security imperative.”

The New Alliance is actually the G8’s fast track for selling out African nations to some of the world’s biggest agribusiness and junk food multinationals.

The G8 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, UK, and the US) has contracted with private business—Cargill, Dupont, Hershey’s, Kraft, Mars, Monsanto, Syngenta, Unilever, Yara, and others—to pony up the US$3 billion in exchange for giving them pretty much free range in the African nations like Ethiopia, Ghana, and Tanzania that are included in the New Alliance program.

The goal of the New Alliance for Food and Security and Nutrition is supposedly to “lift 50 million people out of poverty over the next ten years through inclusive and sustained agricultural growth.” How? With innovative products and techniques, like better seeds. Like Monsanto’s costly genetically-modified seeds that spread poverty, farmer suicides, human infertility, disease, and death wherever they are planted.

While US$3 billion sounds like a hefty commitment to alleviating poverty and hunger, take a look at where that money is actually going. US$2 billion of it will be invested in a “world-class fertilizer production facility” built by the Norwegian company Yara, which is the world’s largest nitrogen fertilizer company.

Two-thirds of the G8’s commitment will go to spreading unsustainable farming practices throughout Africa, supporting massive industrial mono-crop farms on land bought by foreign investors, and worsening greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

Most international organizations working in Africa to alleviate poverty, hunger, and famine know that the solution is helping smallholder African farmers adopt sustainable farming practices—from green cover crops and trees in farm fields to crop diversity—that will improve their nutrition, raise crop yields and their incomes, and enable them to adapt to climate change.

The G8’s New Alliance for Food and Security and Nutrition essentially ignores the best means of helping Africans help themselves in favor of helping huge multinationals help themselves to new profits in Africa.

What can you do to help?

Author Frank Liz is a futurist, an entrepreneur, and author of the “Starving for Answers. Liz speaks about future possibilities of planet, climate change and creating food shortages. He tells us that nearly one billion people ache with hunger and that ecoagriculture is the best way of ending hunger.

To overcome climate change, we need to unite as human beings. We need to bring together millions of people, thousands of communities, and hundreds of countries. How can you help? By donating your time and your ideas to help protect the planet and humanity:

 1.- Share this article with other people.   

 2.-  Send me an email to participate in establishing an educational farm, where you will learn
  and teach others.  Email me at: fliz@savingaplanteatrisk.org

 3.- Write a comment below so that other can see your position about this affair situation.

When people, pundits, politicians, and even some scientists discuss the impact of climate change on our lives, they usually go first to the escalating financial costs of global warming.

But climate change poses an equally grave threat to human health, which does come at a financial cost to those in need of medical care, to healthcare providers, insurers, and businesses which lose productivity to employee sick leave. It also takes an enormous toll on our lives, our families, our communities, and our nations.

Now, more than ever, knowledge is power. The more we know, the better prepared we can be to hopefully minimize the wide-ranging threats climate change poses to human health.

Hunger and Thirst Are Human Health Risks

As long as people have roamed the Earth, food and water shortages have been the gravest threat to human health and security. Climate change is spreading food and water shortages around the world with its higher temperatures, changing weather patterns, and extreme weather events.

Certainly, the world has experienced some natural changes in temperature over the last 10,000 years as human civilizations developed. Those changes usually involved warming and drought, which led to food and water shortages, which caused not only hunger but also disease and unrest.

“Most of the changes [over the past 10,000 years] have been within a band of about plus or minus three-quarters of a degree centigrade,” notes Professor Tony McMichael, an epidemiologist at Australia’s National University McMichael. “Yet we are talking about the likelihood of this century going beyond two degrees centigrade and quite probably, on current trajectory, reaching a global average increase of three to four degrees . . . which presents a quite fundamental threat to the foundations of public health.”

As temperatures increase, crop yields decrease. In the past, when warmer temperatures created food shortages, people were able to move to new locations with better growing conditions. Today, with seven billion people on the planet, and nine billion predicted by 2050, there’s nowhere else we can go.

Already, 2.5 billion people are struggling with malnutrition. Millions of those people are starving to death every year, most of them children.

Climate change-generated water shortages are also wreaking havoc around the world. Not only do these shortages impact agricultural production, they leave people without the water they need to live, let alone to clean their bodies and clothes. People can go for weeks without food. They can’t survive more than three or four days without water.

Water and food shortages have already caused riots in some cities.

Violence also threatens human health.

The World is Going to the Bugs

Most cold-blooded disease-carrying bugs like mosquitoes and ticks, as well as bacteria, love climate change, because they thrive in warmer temperatures. Climate change is creating the perfect growth conditions for them and opening new territories once denied them by freezing temperatures. Not only are the bugs multiplying, they are already roaming far beyond their traditional territories and seasons.

In the U.S., the number of people reported contracting Lyme disease, a tick-borne infection, jumped from 15,000 in the mid-1990s to 40,000 today. Actually, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) believes that number is higher . . . 12 times higher. Nearly half a million people infected.

Reported cases of West Nile Virus in the U.S. have risen from 21 in 2000 to 1,000 in 2010. The Asian Tiger Mosquito, a recent and climate-sensitive immigrant to the U.S., transmits a variety of diseases, including West Nile Virus, Dengue Fever (already reported in Texas and Florida), and Chikungunya virus, which has caused epidemics in Asia, Africa, and most recently Europe.

Climate change also significantly raises the threat of malaria and encephalitis (transmitted by mosquitoes), as well as bubonic plague (transmitted by fleas), and enteric diseases (transmitted by houseflies) like typhoid fever and cholera.

Even if a bug doesn’t cause human disease, it is still impacting human health. Insects can destroy crops, which worsens food shortages. New insect infestations are also destroying millions of acres of forests around the world annually. Trees used to be the foundation for keeping the Earth’s greenhouse gases in check. Today, they are vital to slowing the advance of climate change. Fewer trees means accelerating global warming and worsening health conditions around the world.

Our Vulnerable Elderly

People over 65, particularly those with chronic health issues like heart disease or diabetes, are particularly vulnerable to the impact of climate change in regions where temperatures are rising.

According to a recent U.S. study made by the Harvard School of Public Health and reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for every 1°C/1.8°F increase in summer temperatures above the historic norms, people over the age of 65 with chronic health problems have a 4 percent greater risk of death. Thus, with temperatures expected to climb 3°C to 4°C in this century, these people face a 12 to 16 percent higher death rate.

For people living in poverty and for those people 75 and older, the rates rise higher still.

The problem comes down to this: the elderly and those suffering from chronic conditions do not have the physical resources to adapt to temperature changes.

Managing the Health Risks

Most health risks raised by climate change can be managed by comprehensive local, regional, and national healthcare plans, from public education to increasing the number of healthcare facilities and healthcare providers.

The state of Rajasthan in eastern India is preparing centralized responses to what it considers climate change-generated health risks: increased exposure to insect, water, and food-borne diseases, worsening malnutrition, and the impact of extreme weather events on fatalities and the spread of more diseases.

The state will be focusing on climate change-related public health education and awareness and on increasing disease surveillance and monitoring.

Rajasthan will also be “sensitizing” policy makers and health practitioners to the health risks that climate change creates and it will be integrating those risks into its state-wide healthcare policies.

The state will also be improving and expanding its primary, secondary, and tertiary healthcare systems. Outreach to remote tribal areas, desert districts, and villages will include video conferencing facilities to connect patients with a central health facility.

Rajasthan will also be promoting private investment in medical, dental, and nursing colleges, paramedic training institutes, diagnostic centers, and blood banks.

Cities, counties, states, and nations around the world need to be making similar plans.

As for food and water shortages and escalating insect infestations, see my forthcoming book: Starving For Answers: How Climate Change, Ignorance, and Greed Are Creating a Century of Hunger . . . and What We Can Do About It Now.

Forget Hollywood, Part One: The Real Health Risks of Climate Change

Author Frank Liz is a futurist, an entrepreneur, and author of the “Starving for Answers. Liz speaks about future possibilities of planet, climate change and creating food shortages. He tells us that nearly one billion people ache with hunger and that ecoagriculture is the best way of ending hunger.

To overcome climate change, we need to unite as human beings. We need to bring together millions of people, thousands of communities, and hundreds of countries. How can you help? By donating your time and your ideas to help protect the planet and humanity:

 1.- Share this article with other people.   

 2.-  Send me an email to participate in establishing an educational farm, where you will learn
  and teach others.  Email me at: fliz@savingaplanteatrisk.org

 3.- Write a comment below so that other can see your position about this affair situation.

Forget Hollywood

People, pundits, politicians, and even scientists continue to speak of climate change as if it’s some far off event that will affect us someday like a Hollywood version of a global apocalypse that swallows cities whole and ravages the countryside. Climate change is here, it is affecting us now, the risks we face are real, not computer-generated, and they’re only going to get worse in our lifetimes and our children’s lifetimes.

Now, more than ever, knowledge is power. The more we know, the better prepared we can be to hopefully minimize the wide-ranging threats climate change brings to human lives, property, and national economies.

What’s In Your Wallet?

The one risk that everyone understands is financial. Climate change impacts are already expensive and their costs will soon be exorbitant.

Entire agricultural industries, for example, are threatened by changing weather patterns, from higher temperatures to heavier rains or more frequent droughts. The 2011 drought in Texas cost that state’s agricultural and ranching industries more than $6 billion and raised the price of beef for all Americans.

Crop yields decrease as temperatures climb. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), every 1ºC/1.8ºF rise in the planet’s normal surface temperature means a 10 percent lower crop yield. In this century, we can now expect a 3°C to 4°C rise in surface temperatures, which means crop yields could plummet by 30 to 40 percent. They’re already declining.

When agriculture is the foundation of a nation’s economy, as it is for countries throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, declining crop yields will have a devastating financial impact on everyone, not just farmers. “Decreasing crop yields would shake countries to the core,” warn researchers from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security.

Climate change fuels extreme weather events, like the hard rain and high winds of Hurricane Irene and its salt water storm surge which hit the northeastern United States in 2011, devastating farm fields and crops, which was a financial disaster for farmers.

Massive flooding in the third quarter of 2011 contaminated Vietnam’s aquaculture fish ponds, which supply 90 percent of the world’s Pangasius, an Asian shark catfish with mild-flavored white flesh. Without fish supplies, 70 percent of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta Pangasius processing plants had to shut down.

The financial toll of extreme weather events extends far beyond agricultural fields and aquaculture ponds.

A Costly New Normal

In the United States, insurance losses due to extreme weather events in 2011 totaled $35 billion, which translated into $70 billion in economic losses.

Climate change is turning extreme weather events into the new norm. We’ve been told by scientists to expect more heat waves, more record high temperatures, longer and more severe droughts, more violent rainstorms, more frequent and intense snowstorms, and stronger cyclones/hurricanes.

They’re already here. In 2005 in Mumbai, India, three feet of rain fell on the city in just 24 hours. In March 2012, the U.S. set nearly 6,800 high temperature records.

An extreme weather event can damage or destroy necessary infrastructure, from power lines to roads and bridges. That infrastructure has to be repaired or replaced, and that costs money.

An extreme weather event can damage or destroy a home or business, which has to be repaired or rebuilt, and that costs money. Extreme weather events often turn vehicles like passenger cars, big rig trucks, railroad cars, and boats into playthings, leaving them damaged beyond repair, so they have to be replaced. That costs money, too.

Thus far, according to the IPCC, extreme weather events fueled by climate change cost the world approximately $80 billion in physical damage annually, and much more in economic losses.

Those numbers are about to explode. Take one extreme event: tropical cyclones/hurricanes, which are expected to be more powerful because of climate change. They will cause $109 billion in damage annually, particularly to the U.S. and China, according to a joint Yale University and MIT study released in January 2012.

Cyclone damage to tropical island nations, especially in the Caribbean, as well as Central American countries, will cost as much as 37% of those countries’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Annually. Those figures do not take into account human casualties—injuries and deaths.

It’s not just local, state, and national governments paying for those losses. Extreme weather events are reaching into the pockets of everyday citizens, too. Insurance companies, for example, have been taking a big hit in recent years and now they’re telling their clients to share the load. Companies like Allstate and State Farm are raising home insurance premiums unilaterally, often by as much as 10 percent. Expect them to go higher still in the coming years.

Climate change is also helping to raise food prices, which affects every citizen.

Canada Calculates the Cost

A study from Canada’s National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy found that climate change will cost that country CAD$5 billion a year by 2020, and between CAD$21 billion to CAD$43 billion annually by the 2050s.

Those figures are mostly wishful thinking, because they are based on keeping global warming from climbing more than 2°C/3.96°C by 2050, and that’s far from being a given. The caveats don’t end there. The study predicts that the longer climate change impact is ignored, the higher the costs will run. “Our modelling . . . shows there is a risk those costs could not be just higher, but much higher,” declares the Roundtable.

How high is high? Canada could be looking at CAD$91 billion a year if global warming exceeds the 2°C/3.96°C threshold and the country doesn’t implement all of its planned adaptation strategies.

Actually, the costs to Canada will be higher still, because the study only examined three areas—human health, coastal regions, and timber—and climate change affects so much more than that.

Managing the Financial Risk

We can significantly reduce the financial risk of climate change.

First, we can construct the infrastructure we need to protect people, livestock, and property from extreme weather events. Worried about the cost? The cost of doing nothing is much greater. Plus, infrastructure projects create jobs and support construction-related businesses, which strengthens the economy.

Second, national agricultural policies and programs must mandate sustainable agriculture, which will make our farms much more resilient to climate change and much more productive. “Given the region’s current state of food insecurity, climate-smart agriculture has to become the central part of Asia’s [climate change] adaptation strategy,” says Raj Paroda of the Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions. The same must be said for every other agricultural region on the planet.

Third, plan for comprehensive disaster response now at the local, regional, and national levels. See my earlier article, “Preparing for Trouble: Communities and Climate Change,” for more ideas.

Author Frank Liz is a futurist, an entrepreneur, and author of the “Starving for Answers. Liz speaks about future possibilities of planet, climate change and creating food shortages. He tells us that nearly one billion people ache with hunger and that ecoagriculture is the best way of ending hunger.

To overcome climate change, we need to unite as human beings. We need to bring together millions of people, thousands of communities, and hundreds of countries. How can you help? By donating your time and your ideas to help protect the planet and humanity:

 1.- Share this article with other people.   

 2.-  Send me an email to participate in establishing an educational farm, where you will learn
  and teach others.  Email me at: fliz@savingaplanteatrisk.org

 3.- Write a comment below so that other can see your position about this affair situation.

Seeing the writing on the wall—that the world will not take the necessary actions now to stop climate change in its tracks (and even if it did, thanks to thermal inertia, the Earth would continue to head up for another 20 to 30 years)—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a 594-page report on March 27, 2012 detailing the current and coming impact of climate change on nine extreme weather events and, in turn, their impact on communities around the world. The report, based on a study of extreme weather events over the past 60 years, and particularly over the last decade, recommends short-term and long-term actions that communities and countries must take now to protect themselves from our increasingly volatile weather.

The IPCC report predicts more frequent and longer droughts and heat waves, more numerous wildfires, stronger tropical cyclones/hurricanes, more frequent and extreme snow storms and rainstorms (deluges), floods, and storm surges. Every country, every city, faces one, and often several, of these threats.

The Russian summer of 2010, for example, was a months-long heat wave that generated the country’s highest temperatures in 500 years, killed more than 15,000 people, caused over 500 wildfires, and destroyed more than 30 percent of the country’s grain harvest.

In March 2012, eastern Australia was deluged with torrential rainstorms. The state of New South Wales suffered more than $530 million in damage. Residential areas in Sydney were evacuated. Worse rains followed in April.

Particularly threatened by climate change-fueled extreme rain storms and cyclones/hurricanes, not to mention rising sea levels, are cities built on, or sprawling into, flood plains, low-lying coasts, and coastal landfill. Houston, Miami, and New York are just some of the cities threatened in the U.S. Much of lower Manhattan, for example, is constructed on landfill, including Battery Park City and the World Trade Center area. They face a future of repeated flooding.

The IPCC report recommends a wide variety of actions that communities and countries can take now to minimize the loss of life and reduce property damage today and tomorrow, starting with local, regional, and national warning networks to alert the populace of a coming extreme weather event so that they can take the actions necessary to protect themselves, from laying in fuel and food and water in the event of a massive blizzard to moving to higher ground in case of a storm surge or flood.

Bangladesh is one of the favored landing points for severe storms. Since the 1970s, it has created a wide variety of programs to protect people, livestock, and property, including warning systems. It constructed raised artificial knolls, each of which can protect 300 to 400 head of livestock from storm surges. It built multistory shelters for people. It is restoring coastal mangrove forests to reduce the impact of storm surges. With this infrastructure in place, Tropical Cyclone Sidr killed more than 3,400 people in 2007, compared to the more than 138,000 people killed by the slightly weaker Tropical Cyclone Nargis in 2008 in Myanmar (Burma), a country which had made no preparations to withstand major storms.

Other IPCC recommendations include significantly better stormwater drainage in cities and protecting and enhancing ecosystems, particularly mangroves, wetlands, and forests which significantly mitigate flooding and storm surges.

The report urges better building standards, not only to assure construction of structures able to withstand extreme weather events, but to prevent construction of buildings in threatened areas, like flood plains.

The IPCC recommends revamping local and national health systems to improve the health of the population, which will enable them to better withstand the privations caused by a weather disaster, and to help health care systems better respond to the injuries and illnesses caused by an extreme weather event as well as shifting weather patterns. Mosquito and tick-borne diseases, for example, are spreading into regions never before afflicted by these illnesses, because warmer temperatures are allowing insects to migrate into new areas. Those communities need to be laying in vaccines and medicines now and educating the public about how to protect themselves from these new threats.

For poorer nations, which are particularly threatened by extreme weather events, because of poverty, large populations, and slum-filled mega-cities which have minimal infrastructure, the report recommends spreading the financial risk of disasters with tools like micro-insurance, catastrophe bonds, remittances, and national and regional risk pools to help fund rebuilding and recovery after a weather disaster.

The IPCC also recommends social changes to help communities and countries better adapt to extreme weather events, particularly the advancement of women’s rights and education and the inclusion of women in community disaster planning activities.

Finally, the IPCC recommends planned migration from communities that simply cannot withstand multiple extreme weather events. The nation of Kiribati, comprised of one island and 32 low-lying coral atolls, recently purchased 6,000 acres on Fiji’s mainland, because already rising sea levels, more powerful storms, and more extreme storm surges will soon force its people to relocate or drown.

Mumbai, in western India on the Arabian Sea, is partially built on drained wetlands, former mangrove swamps and forests, and landfill. It is a bathtub waiting to fill up. Mumbai has more than 20 million people, extensive poverty, a nearly non-existent drainage system, vast slums threatened by both flooding and landslides, and food and potable water shortages. Thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of lives could be lost if a single cyclone made landfall today. Property damage would be massive. The IPCC report singled out Mumbai as a candidate for relocation.

The Canadian province of Ontario is one of the few regions in North America actively working to protect itself from extreme weather events. It has already launched Climate Ready, Ontario’s Adaptation Strategy and Action Plan, 2011-2014, which covers a wide variety of actions, from amending the province’s building code to creating adaptation strategies for the region’s watersheds, integrating climate impact into infrastructure development, and establishing a new Climate Change Adaptation Directorate to drive implementation of the plan.

In March 2012, Gord Miller, Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner, issued a news release supporting the plan, but warned that there are gaps in its strategy to limit the damage that will be caused by fiercer and more frequent ice storms, heavy rains, and heat waves. He urged the government to prioritize the actions in its plan, set specific targets and timelines, and outline the responsibilities of key government ministries, like the Ministry of Energy.

When it comes to climate change, there is always more to be done.

Frank Liz is a futurist, an entrepreneur, and author of the “Starving for Answers. Liz speaks about future possibilities of planet, climate change and creating food shortages. He tells us that nearly one billion people ache with hunger and that ecoagriculture is the best way of ending hunger.

Author Frank Liz is a futurist, an entrepreneur, and author of the “Starving for Answers. Liz speaks about future possibilities of planet, climate change and creating food shortages. He tells us that nearly one billion people ache with hunger and that ecoagriculture is the best way of ending hunger.

To overcome climate change, we need to unite as human beings. We need to bring together millions of people, thousands of communities, and hundreds of countries. How can you help? By donating your time and your ideas to help protect the planet and humanity:

 1.- Share this article with other people.   

 2.-  Send me an email to participate in establishing an educational farm, where you will learn
  and teach others.  Email me at: fliz@savingaplanteatrisk.org

 3.- Write a comment below so that other can see your position about this affair situation.

Rachel Maddow, host of The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, has a hard time getting Republicans, particularly right-wing conservatives, on her show, because she is openly liberal, and feminist, and Democrat, and gay.

But in March 2012, she scored a one-on-one interview with U.S. Senator James Inhofe, an ultra-conservative Republican from Oklahoma who is a member of the Committee on Environment and Public Works and who has likened the EPA to the Gestapo.

Senator Inhofe is also a notorious climate change denialist who, in his recent book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, claims that there is no global warming crisis. The alleged “crisis” is in reality a plot to impose massive regulations and taxes on Americans, and particularly on American businesses, to control every aspect of our lives and institute a massive redistribution of wealth through the use of carbon taxes and regulations that will destroy American business, particularly the energy industry.

In interviews promoting the book, Senator Inhofe has insisted that, when it comes to climate, not only do we have nothing to worry about, we must not under any circumstances take any actions to affect the weather, because that’s God’s job. “The arrogance of people to think that we human beings would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is outrageous,” he told radio interviewer Vic Eliason on Voice of Christian Youth America.

What he told Rachel Maddow, however, was truly outrageous.

In the MSNBC interview, he said that “I was actually on your side on this issue [climate change] when I was chairing that [the Senate’s Environment and Public Works] committee and I first heard about this. I thought it must be true, until I found out what it cost.” [emphasis added]

Senator Inhofe recognized that climate change was real, it was happening, until he found how much money businesses and governments would have to spend to significantly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and halt global warming.

If a solution costs money, the problem can’t be real?

In accidentally telling the truth, Senator Inhofe exposed the driving force behind climate change denialism: money.

Senator Inhofe’s constituents aren’t the people of Oklahoma, they are the businesses of Oklahoma. The Senator has received more than $1.3 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.

If the oil and gas industry cared about the planet and the people on it rather than its own short-term profits, if it decided that it had to end its massive greenhouse gas emissions to help reverse climate change, it would cost the industry trillions of dollars in lost investment in oil and gas infrastructure, facilities, and contracts, lost government subsidies, and in new investment in renewable energy.

Admitting that climate change is real, that fossil fuel emissions are the driving force behind climate change, just doesn’t pencil out for the oil and gas industry, and thus for Senator Inhofe and all the other climate change denialists.

Money is more important than saving the planet and the people on it.

Isn’t that what the Bible says?

Author Frank Liz is a futurist, an entrepreneur, and author of the “Starving for Answers. Liz speaks about future possibilities of planet, climate change and creating food shortages. He tells us that nearly one billion people ache with hunger and that ecoagriculture is the best way of ending hunger.

To overcome climate change, we need to unite as human beings. We need to bring together millions of people, thousands of communities, and hundreds of countries. How can you help? By donating your time and your ideas to help protect the planet and humanity:

 1.- Share this article with other people.   

 2.- Send me an email to participate in establishing an educational farm, where you will learn
  and teach others.  Email me at: fliz@savingaplanteatrisk.org

 3.- Write a comment below so that other can see your position about this affair situation.

A decade ago, in exchange for International Monetary Fund loans, India not only allowed Monsanto to begin selling its genetically-modified (GM) cotton, known as Bt cotton, to farmers, it joined Monsanto in a massive marketing campaign to encourage cotton farmers to abandon their traditional seeds and adopt the GM cotton. The government and Monsanto promised that Bt cotton would give farmers much higher yields, generate greater incomes than they had ever known, and lower their costs by resisting pests and reducing their use of pesticides. Today, 90 percent of India’s cotton farmers grow Bt cotton.

On January 9, 2012, the Indian Ministry of Agriculture sent a devastating internal advisory to the country’s nine cotton-growing states. Based on studies conducted by the Indian Council of Agricultural Studies and the Central Cotton Research Institute (the country’s chief cotton research facility), the Ministry warned the states of significantly declining Bt cotton crop yields after the first five years of production, growing parasite and pest infestations and the need for greater pesticide use, higher costs tied to both the GM seeds and the greater pesticide use, Bt cotton’s heavy water demands which are twice those of traditional cotton crops, and the severe toll these escalating problems have taken on India’s farmers.

“Cotton farmers are in a deep crisis since shifting to Bt cotton,” declares the advisory. “The spate of farmer suicides in 2011-12 has been particularly severe among Bt cotton farmers.”

In a single region within the state of Maharashtra, 209 farmers committed suicide in 2011.

What has suicide to do with Monsanto’s Bt cotton?

Bt cotton seeds are 1,000 percent more expensive than traditional seeds. To purchase Bt cotton seeds, as they must do each year, because the seeds produced by Bt cotton are sterile, most Indian farmers must borrow the money they need at exorbitant interest rates. As crop yields decline, and as crops fail because of drought or parasite and insect infestations, farmers are unable to repay their growing debts to local moneylenders.

Indian farmers growing other Monsanto-developed GM crops are caught in the same deadly spiral.

Back in 2008, HRH Prince Charles of Great Britain was lambasted as a scaremonger and a liar and a contrarian trying to turn the world from progress when he publicly demanded that something be done to stop the spread of GM crops and the deaths they were causing, stating that thousands of Indian smallholder farmers were killing themselves after switching to GM crops.

The truth, according to the Indian Ministry of Agriculture, is that more than 1,000 small farmers kill themselves each month, most of them because of their massive GM-generated debts.

Thus far, more than 125,000 farmers have committed suicide in India.

In response, Prince Charles has established the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation to help Indian farm families devastated by suicide and to promote the switch from GM crops to organic Indian crops.

What can you do to help?

To overcome climate change, we need to unite as human beings. We need to bring together millions of people, thousands of communities, and hundreds of countries. How can you help? By donating your time and your ideas to help protect the planet and humanity:

 1.- Share this article with other people.   

 2.-  Send me an email to participate in establishing an educational farm, where you will learn
  and teach others.  Email me at: fliz@savingaplanteatrisk.org

 3.- Write a comment below so that other can see your position about this affair situation.

Author Frank Liz is a futurist, an entrepreneur, and author of the “Starving for Answers. Liz speaks about future possibilities of planet, climate change and creating food shortages. He tells us that nearly one billion people ache with hunger and that ecoagriculture is the best way of ending hunger.

Americans are poisoning themselves daily

and

they don’t know it.

Americans are eating genetically-engineered foods every day and they don’t know it. That’s why they don’t know they’re poisoning themselves.

In the United States, 88 percent of the corn, 93 percent of the canola, and 94 percent of the soybeans are genetically-modified. Genetically modified tomatoes, pork, and salmon, among many other foods, are also in our stores. In 2011, the country had 69 million hectares (170.5 million acres) of GM cropland.

Are you a vegetarian who uses textured vegetable protein (TVP) or tempeh in your recipes? TVP and tempeh are derived from soybeans. If the package didn’t say organic, then you’re probably eating genetically-modified products. As for soy milk, tofu, and miso . . . well, you get the idea.

For babies allergic to dairy, there is even

soy-based infant formula.

Are you a carnivore? Livestock feed for cattle, pigs, chickens, and aquaculture catfish is dominated by corn and soy . . . genetically modified corn and soybeans. In fact, 98 percent of the American soy crop is used in livestock feed. So, when you eat meat, you’re eating a GM product.

Approximately 75 percent of the processed food in American grocery stores has genetically-engineered ingredients. High fructose corn syrup, for example, is found in most sodas, many snack foods, ketchup, and even commercial bread and that syrup usually comes from GM corn.

If the food label has words like ascorbate, lysine, maltodextrin, modified food starch, or xanthan gum than you’re probably eating GM-derived food.

What do GM foods have to do with poison?

They are poison. Literally.

Genetic engineering has produced toxins never seen before, and those toxins are in the GM foods we’re eating. It has increased the level of allergens in GM crops, altered the composition of protein and other nutrients, and increased the GM crop’s absorption of pesticides and other chemicals. It doesn’t matter how much we wash an ear of corn. We’re eating those pesticides and chemicals, too.

Scientists have linked microRNA (ribonucleic acid) to cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease, among other illnesses. It is found in GM crops, like rice, and in the blood and organs of people who eat those GM crops. Recently, Chinese scientists found that microRNA survives the human digestive process and affects, among other things, our cholesterol function.

GM scientists now propose splicing microRNA into more seeds to block the function of specific genes in insects, so that the GM crops can better resist pest infestations. Unfortunately, humans and insects share a lot of the same DNA. Thus, the microRNA in a GM crop would undoubtedly impact human genes as well when it is eaten.

In independent laboratories from the U.S. to Russia, animals fed GM foods suffered damage to their kidneys, livers, hearts, adrenal glands, spleens, and the haemotopoietic (blood-forming) system. They slowed immune response times, provoked often severe inflammatory (allergic) responses, and altered testicles and sperm cells in males. Infant size and weight dropped. Infant mortality rates skyrocketed to over 50 percent.

In a 2011 published study of human consumption of GM foods, scientists found that the genetic material inserted into GM soybeans transferred into bacteria living inside human intestines, stayed there, and continued to function.

Traces of Bt toxin from Monsanto Bt corn were found in the blood of 93 percent of the women studied and in 80 percent of their umbilical cord and fetal blood.

In Europe, the German chemical company, BASF, moved its GM plant-science headquarters from Germany to Raleigh, North Carolina. Widespread opposition from citizens, farmers, and politicians to its GM crops, like the Amflora potato, meant that BASF had no market for its GM seeds.

GM giant Monsanto has stopped developing genetically-engineered crops to be grown in Europe, because most European countries refuse to allow them to be grown.

In America, however, the Food & Drug Administration’s Deputy Commissioner for Food Safety is a former Monsanto executive. In February 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sped up the approval process for genetically-modified foods.

When he was campaigning for the presidency in 2007 and 2008, Barack Obama promised to introduce legislation mandating the labeling of GM foods. So far, he’s done nothing. So, grassroots movements in several states like California and Florida and Vermont are putting GM labeling bills on their ballots.

If they pass, people will at least have the information they need to decide whether to poison themselves or not.

What can you do to help?

To overcome climate change, we need to unite as human beings. We need to bring together millions of people, thousands of communities, and hundreds of countries. How can you help? By donating your time and your ideas to help protect the planet and humanity:

 1.- Share this article with other people.   

 2.-  Send me an email to participate in establishing an educational farm, where you will learn
  and teach others.  Email me at: fliz@savingaplanteatrisk.org

 3.- Write a comment below so that other can see your position about this affair situation.

Author: Frank Liz is a futurist, an entrepreneur, and the author of Saving A Planet At Risk: How Climate Change and Global Food Shortages Could End Civilization . . . and What We Can Do to Save the World.