Category: Archive

Daryl Hannah’s green lifestyle: Daryl Hannah’s commitment is longstanding. She’s been a vegetarian since she was a kid; her two houses, one in the Rockies and one in Southern California, have been off the grid for a dozen years, relying on solar panels and greywater systems.

"I’ve got a carbon surplus": She buys carbon offsets for all of her travel. “I’ve carbon neutralized myself so many times,” she says, “I’ve got a carbon surplus. But I still continue to do it.”

Hollywood sidesteps environmental responsibility: Hannah says the problem suffuses Hollywood: “They make hundreds of movies every year, yet there’s only a handful with environmental themes. It’s unfortunate because you would think they would want to use their voice and the power that they have to do something positive.”

Hannah plans "extreme activists" docos: Hannah is taking matters into her own hands. Through her production company she is developing a series of full-length documentaries about what she calls “extreme activists”.

The Australian Financial Review, 19/8/2006, p. 23

Florida’s lawmakers are not only prescribing a specific view of U.S. history that must be taught (my favorite among the specific commands in the law is the one about instructing students on "the nature and importance of free enterprise to the United States economy"), but are trying to legislate out of existence any ideas to the contrary. They are not just saying that their history is the best history, but that it is beyond interpretation. In fact, the law attempts to suppress discussion of the very idea that history is interpretation.

The fundamental fallacy of the law is in the underlying assumption that "factual" and "constructed" are mutually exclusive in the study of history. There certainly are many facts about history that are widely, and sometimes even unanimously, agreed upon. But how we arrange those facts into a narrative to describe and explain history is clearly a construction, an interpretation. That’s the task of historians — to assess factual assertions about the past, weave them together in a coherent narrative, and construct an explanation of how and why things happened.

For example, it’s a fact that Europeans began coming in significant numbers to North America in the 17th century. Were they peaceful settlers or aggressive invaders? That’s interpretation, a construction of the facts into a narrative with an argument for one particular way to understand those facts.

It’s also a fact that once those Europeans came, the indigenous people died in large numbers. Was that an act of genocide? Whatever one’s answer, it will be an interpretation, a construction of the facts to support or reject that conclusion.

In contemporary history, has U.S. intervention in the Middle East been aimed at supporting democracy or controlling the region’s crucial energy resources? Would anyone in a free society want students to be taught that there is only one way to construct an answer to that question?

Speaking of contemporary history, what about the fact that before the 2000 presidential election, Florida’s Republican secretary of state removed  57,700 names from the voter rolls, supposedly because they were convicted felons and not eligible to vote. It’s a fact that at least 90 percent were not criminals — but were African American. It’s a fact that black people vote overwhelmingly Democratic. What conclusion will historians construct from those facts about how and why that happened?http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2

In other words, history is always constructed, no matter how much Florida’s elected representatives might resist the notion. The real question is: How effectively can one defend one’s construction? If Florida legislators felt the need to write a law to eliminate the possibility of that question even being asked, perhaps it says something about their faith in their own view and ability to defend it.

One of the bedrock claims of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment — two movements that, to date, have not been repealed by the Florida Legislature — is that no interpretation or theory is beyond challenge. The evidence and logic on which all knowledge claims are based must be transparent, open to examination. We must be able to understand and critique the basis for any particular construction of knowledge, which requires that we understand how knowledge is constructed.

Except in Florida.

But as tempting as it is to ridicule, we should not spend too much time poking fun at this one state, because the law represents a yearning one can find across the United States. Americans look out at a wider world in which more and more people reject the idea of the United States as always right, always better, always moral. As the gap between how Americans see themselves and how the world sees us grows, the instinct for many is to eliminate intellectual challenges at home: "We can’t control what the rest of the world thinks, but we can make sure our kids aren’t exposed to such nonsense."

The irony is that such a law is precisely what one would expect in a totalitarian society, where governments claim the right to declare certain things to be true, no matter what the debates over evidence and interpretation. The preferred adjective in the United States for this is "Stalinist," a system to which U.S. policymakers were opposed during the Cold War. At least, that’s what I learned in history class.

People assume that these kinds of buffoonish actions are rooted in the arrogance and ignorance of Americans, and there certainly are excesses of both in the United States.

But the Florida law — and the more widespread political mindset it reflects — also has its roots in fear. A track record of relatively successful domination around the world seems to have produced in Americans a fear of any lessening of that dominance. Although U.S. military power is unparalleled in world history, we can’t completely dictate the shape of the world or the course of events. Rather than examining the complexity of the world and expanding the scope of one’s inquiry, the instinct of some is to narrow the inquiry and assert as much control as possible to avoid difficult and potentially painful challenges to orthodoxy.

Is history "knowable, teachable and testable"? Certainly people can work hard to know — to develop interpretations of processes and events in history and to understand competing interpretations. We can teach about those views. And students can be tested on their understanding of conflicting constructions of history.

But the real test is whether Americans can come to terms with not only the grand triumphs but also the profound failures of our history. At stake in that test is not just a grade in a class, but our collective future.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu .

Air travel in Australia in 2004 accounted for about 4.8 million tonnes of emissions, according to the latest National Greenhouse Accounts, but the national accounts don’t include international travel, meaning that the emissions from overseas flights hang in mid-air, reported The Courier-Mail (19/8/2006, p.71).

Australia created a total of 564.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in 2004, with Queensland making up almost 30 per cent, according to the accounts.

39m tonnes from air travel: A report commissioned by not-for-profit organisation Carbon Neutral has claimed the actual amount of carbon dioxide produced by air travel, taking into account the international flights, is more likely to be about 39 million tonnes, eight times the Federal Government’s official figures.

Emissions offset offer: Carbon Neutral, based in Western Australia, offers the greener traveller the chance to ease the impact flights have on the planet. The organisation’s website works out how many tonnes of harmful gases your flight creates (based on a 75 per cent full Boeing 747) and the number of trees you would need to plant to cancel it out.

Native trees to absorb CO2: Then you can choose to pay Carbon Neutral to plant those native trees for you which, over the next 30 years, will absorb the carbon dioxide pumped out from the plane’s engines.

Scheme not popular: Despite the fact that payments are tax-deductible, the scheme has not been an easy one to sell, particularly to the travel industry. Just 10 people have chosen to offset flight greenhouse gas emissions in this first year.

Qld Govt pays for 400,000 trees: Victoria-based Greenfleet is another organisation offering an offset service for flights and vehicle emissions. One of its biggest supporters is the Queensland Government’s commercial vehicle business QFleet, which has paid for more than 400,000 trees to be planted to offset its emissions.

EPA seeks air travel options: The Queensland Government’s Environmental Protection Agency said it was currently looking at ways to offset the carbon emissions created by the air travel of its staff.

2.5m extra trees for Qld: Greenfleet has planted some 2.5 million trees in Queensland and will plant an additional 87,000 this year, including 37,000 at Elanda Point on the Sunshine Coast and 10,000 around Somerset Dam.

Vic organisations on board: Monash University in Victoria, business services company SAI Global (with offices in Brisbane) and Victorian Government agency Sustainability Victoria are all paying Greenfleet to offset the environmental impacts of staff air travel. Greenfleet communications manager Cathie Agg said: "This is not just a feel-good exercise."

The Courier Mail, 19/8/2006, p. 71

Source: Erisk Net  

Alaska Republican Senator Ted Stevens, the powerful Commerce Committee chair, is trying to line up votes for his " Advanced Telecommunications and Opportunities Reform Act." It was Stevens who called the Internet a " series of tubes" as he tried to explain his bill. Now the subject of well-honed satirical jabs from The Daily Show, as well as dozens of independently made videos, Stevens is hunkering down to get his bill passed by the Senate when it reconvenes in September.

But thanks to the work of groups like Save the Internet, many Senate Democrats now oppose the bill because of its failure to address net neutrality. (Disclosure: The Center for Digital Democracy, where I work, is a member of that coalition.) Oregon Democrat Senator Ron Wyden, Maine Republican Olympia Snowe and North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan have joined forces to protect the US Internet. Wyden has placed a "hold" on the bill, requiring Stevens (and the phone and cable lobbies) to strong-arm sixty colleagues to prevent a filibuster. But with a number of GOP senators in tight races now fearful of opposing net neutrality, the bill’s chances for passage before the midterm election are slim. Stevens, however, may be able to gain enough support for passage when Congress returns for a lame-duck session.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Thus far, the strategy of the phone and cable lobbies has been to dismiss concerns about net neutrality as either paranoid fantasies or political discontent from progressives. "It’s a made-up issue," AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre said in early August at a meeting of state regulators. New Hampshire Republican Senator John Sununu claims that net neutrality is "what the liberal left have hung their hat on," suggesting that the outcry over Internet freedom is more partisan than substantive. Other critics of net neutrality, including many front groups, have tried to frame the debate around unsubstantiated fears about users finding access to websites blocked, pointing to a 2005 FCC policy statement that "consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice." But the issue of blocking has been purposefully raised to shift the focus from what should be the real concerns about why the phone and cable giants are challenging federal rules requiring nondiscriminatory treatment of digital content.

Verizon, Comcast and the others are terrified of the Internet as we know it today. Net neutrality rules would jeopardize their far-reaching plans to transform our digital communications system. Both the cable and phone industries recognize that if their broadband pipes (now a monopoly) must be operated in an open and neutral fashion, they will face real competition–and drastically reduced revenues–from an ever-growing number of lower-cost phone and video providers. Alcatel, a major technology company helping Verizon and AT&T build their broadband networks, notes in one business white paper that cable and phone companies are "really competing with the Internet as a business model, which is even more formidable than just competing with a few innovative service aggregators such as Google, Yahoo and Skype." (Skype is a telephone service provider using the Internet.)

Policy Racket

The goal of dominating the nation’s principal broadband pipeline serving all of our everyday (and ever-growing) communications needs is also a major motivation behind opposition to net neutrality. Alcatel and other broadband equipment firms are helping the phone and cable industries build what will be a reconfigured Internet–one optimized to generate what they call " triple play" profits from "high revenue services such as video, voice and multimedia communications." Triple play means generating revenues from a single customer who is using a bundle of services for phone, TV and PC–at home, at work or via wireless devices. The corporate system emerging for the United States (and elsewhere in the world) is being designed to boost how much we spend on services, so phone and cable providers can increase what they call our "ARPU" (average revenue per user). This is the "next generation" Internet system being created for us, one purposefully designed to facilitate the needs of a mass consumerist culture.

Absent net neutrality and other safeguards, the phone/cable plan seeks to impose what is called a "policy-based" broadband system that creates "rules" of service for every user and online content provider. How much one can afford to spend would determine the range and quality of digital media access. Broadband connections would be governed by ever-vigilant network software engaged in "traffic policing" to insure each user couldn’t exceed the "granted resources" supervised by "admission control" technologies. Mechanisms are being put in place so our monopoly providers can "differentiate charging in real time for a wide range of applications and events." Among the services that can form the basis of new revenues, notes Alcatel, is online content related to "community, forums, Internet access, information, news, find your way (navigation), marketing push, and health monitoring."

Missing from the current legislative debate on communications is how the plans of cable and phone companies threaten civic participation, the free flow of information and meaningful competition. Nor do the House or Senate versions of the bill insure that the public will receive high-speed Internet service at a reasonable price. According to market analysts, the costs US users pay for broadband service is more than eight times higher than what subscribers pay in Japan and South Korea. (Japanese consumers pay a mere 75 cents per megabit. South Koreans are charged only 73 cents. But US users are paying $6.10 per megabit. Internet service abroad is also much faster than it is here.)

Why are US online users being held hostage to higher rates at slower speeds? Blame the business plans of the phone and cable companies. As technology pioneer Bob Frankston and PBS tech columnist Robert Cringely recently explained , the phone and cable companies see our broadband future as merely a "billable event." Frankston and Cringely urge us to be part of a movement where we–and our communities–are not just passive generators of corporate profit but proactive creators of our own digital futures. That means we would become owners of the "last mile" of fiber wire, the key link to the emerging broadband world. For about $17 a month, over ten years, the high-speed connections coming to our homes would be ours–not in perpetual hock to phone or cable monopolists. Under such a scenario, notes Cringely, we would just pay around $2 a month for super-speed Internet access.

Regardless of whether Congress passes legislation in the fall, progressives need to create a forward-looking telecom policy agenda. They should seek to insure online access for low-income Americans, provide public oversight of broadband services, foster the development of digital communities and make it clear that the public’s free speech rights online are paramount. It’s now time to help kill the Stevens "tube" bill and work toward a digital future where Internet access is a right–and not dependent on how much we can pay to "admission control."