The Generator is at EcoForum in Sydney this week. Watch this space for a series of interviews with the exhibitors and speakers at that conference.

Despite having been discredited a number of times, geologist Ian Plimer is making media waves and lots of money from his dogged opposition of the basic facts on climate change. With no qualifications in meteorology, climatology or hydrology, Plimer trots out the regular arguments used by the fossil fuel lobby. They are that most carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from geological events, that on a geological time frame we are due for a period of cooling rather than warming, and that on short term time frame trends in the last decade do not show consistent warming. In fact, until last year they showed distinct cooling, but the hottest summer on record in 2009 has blown that furphy and reduced its prominence in the denier’s standard spiel.

Read the NFF press release

Read a complete debunking of Ian Plimer’s positions

 

All these facts are true, but they have absolutely nothing to do with the evidence on global warming. The impact of human output of carbon dioxide is not significant compared to the swings in atomospheric concentrations of the gas over geological epochs, but it is remarkably significant over a time frame measured in centuries. Similarly, the galactic cycles that affect solar influence on the earth’s climate and the geological cycles that are measured in hundreds of thousands of years, may far outweigh the puny influence that living organisms have on the earth, but our life span and our influence is limited to the scale of individual centuries not thousands of them.

To jump from a scale of hundreds of thousands of years to a scale of individual years and then say, the long term picture and the short term picture, both show that climate science is wrong, is not only bad statistics, it is invalid science. The weather in individual years is almost useless in predicting trends and merely highlight the difference between the weather and the climate. Plimer has simply hunted for any evidence that runs counter to the overwhelming weight of evidence showing that human greenhouse emissions are damaging the earth.

It is always difficult, and dangerous, to attribute motives, but Plimer is not only receiving money and publicity directly from his denial of climate change, he is allied with the Canadian group, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project which refuses to confirm or deny whether its funding comes substantially from energy companies, but which has three directors who are executives of the High Park Advocacy Group, a lobby group working on behalf of energy companies. He is also an Associate of the Institute of Public Affairs, a right wing policy group with connections to the extreme dries in the Liberal Party that has published policy positions advocating privatisation, deregulation, reduction in the power of unions and denial of most significant environmental problems, including climate change.

The entire notion of balance in reporting has been abused by lobby groups from tobacco in the sixties, through star wars in the eighties to climate deniers now. If every extremist was given equal time to put their opinion on every item in the news, news bulletins would take hours and would be dominated by the rantings of extremists all demanding equal time. It is up to editors to decide what is fair on the basis of the evidence and community values, rather than let well backed publicists promote extreme views simply by demanding balance.

For the National Farmers Federation to promote Plimer’s contribution to the debate as a blow for balance is disingenuous at best and will be judged by most as deliberately misleading. Either way, it paints the organisation into a corner which is not in the best interests of its broadest membership base, farmers, from which it will be almost impossible to escape. Accepting the facts on global warming and working on new pasture and land management techniques to reduce methane production and biosequester carbon are what the world and the traditional membership of the NFF needs. To come out backing a lobbyist for the fossil fuel sector indicates the extreme positions that the current NFF leadership is prepared to adopt to court the agribusiness companies from which it hopes to get most of its money in the future. The fact that two state organisations have already deserted the once powerful lobby group on the basis of its support for agribusiness at the expense of the farmer on the land, indicates how thoroughly it has lost its way.

To back a discredited gun for hire who has been publicly shamed so many times indicates that it has lost its media savvy as well. The NFF could well lose the vote at next month’s national conference to alllow agribusiness companies in as paid up members. If it does, the current leadership will also be on the line. Backing Plimer is a high risk bid to polarise the membership. It might well backfire.

On the same day that a Conspiracy Theory of the Week segment apeared on The Generator, Common Dreams ran an article about the nature of Geopolitical chess games and the Somali Pirates. The Generator Conspiracy Theory of the Week and the Common Dreams piece, both concentrated on the role of international politics in forcing Somali fishermen to lives of robbery on the high seas.

What neither article took into account is the role of piracy in tipping international affairs into new territory.

In the eighth decade before the Christian era, pirate activites against the Roman grain supply led a young Julius Caeser to become involved in a failed campaign against the pirates, followed by his first attempt at a tirumvarate combining business, military and political interests that cast the mould for his short but brilliant military and political career and cemented Roman imperialism.

Ancient history, perhaps. More recently a completely different take on piracy points to the future nature of activism and political power itself. Frustrated by the ineptness of the “chattering classes” (to borrow Rupert’s disengenous phrase) co-founder of Greenpeace, Paul Watson, resigned all positions in that organisation and set up a direct action group called Sea Shepherd. His comments on pirates are well documented, but have been publicised only by The Generator and the Epoch Times, independent mediia outlets with no corporate ownership.

Watson’s view, like those expressed in the Common Dream piece by Johann Hari, is that piracy arrives at times of political corruption as a marine form of guerilla warfare against imperial control of local resources. As Watson is only to happy to point out, the tradition of the noble pirate runs deep in revolutionary history as well as adventure stories and fantasies such as the Depp, Jack Sparrow franchise.

The lesson for all of us now, is that governments are increasingly sacrificing our interests to those of the corporations that fund them. It is at times like this that figures arise who take the law into their own hands in local uprisings.

Ironically, these heroic individuals often lay the foundations of empires to come. The Mediterranian pirates of classical times gave Caeser the impetus to create an empire that was formed in his name. The pirates of the Carribean lent support to a protestant Queen of England who was diplomatically stymied from throwing of the Roman yoke at home.

As Watson has memorably put it, “John Paul Jones, a pirate, founded the US Navy and the Russian Navy.” In a classic example of being careful what we wish for, we need deliverance from our corrupt and ineffectual leaders which can only come from charismatic individuals who practice a creed of courage over caution. The irony is that this creed tends to found populist regimes with potentially dictatorial tendencies.

Since then Canadian Paul Watson has captained his own ship the, Sea Shepherd, recently renamed the Steve Irwin, as part of the society he founded in 1977, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (S.S.C.S). An international non-profit marine wildlife conservation organization, the SSCS now owns a fleet of three ships and has sailed over 200 missions to fulfil its charter: “to end the destruction of habitat and slaughter of wildlife in the world’s oceans in order to conserve and protect ecosystems and species.”

Below is an edited interview with Captain Paul Watson conducted by Giovanni Ebono of The Generator for Bay FM, Byron Bay, Australia.

GE: What is it particularly about whales that got you excited?

PW: I have been involved with protecting a lot of different species throughout my life. I spent six months hunting elephant poachers in East Africa in 78- but I decided had to set up an organisation, not to protest, but to uphold international conservation law and I had to narrow that down and specialise as there was just too much to do.

GE: What sort of criteria did you use to establish such an organisation?

PW: I had been a co founder of Greenpeace and an expedition leader for Greenpeace. I got to a point where the protesting was getting frustrating for me because we were protesting, but nothing changes, it just sort of comes from a submissive position, [ie] ‘please please don’t do that’. And I said well  these guys are breaking the law so there is no reason  for us to be so submissive about it,  lets just simply enforce the law against them, and that is why I set up Sea Shepherd (SSCS), to enforce the law.

And we are empowered to intervene by virtue of the UN World Charter for Nature that allows for non government organisations and individuals to uphold international conventions on law so that is why over the last 25 years I have been able to shut down illegal sealing, whaling and fishing operations, ramming, sinking vessels, confiscating millions of dollars of equipment, because all of these things have been utilised illegally. So, I have never been convicted of a crime for any of those interventions because we are not protesting something we disagree with, we are shutting down illegal activities that should be shutdown.

GE: All of these international conventions exist because of the cooperation of governments. How are you able to exercise that authority?

PW: Well the UN Charter for Nature allows for individual interventions and we just take it upon ourselves to do it so all we do is, we just do it. There is no reason why Australia and NZ can’t go down there and kick the Japanese out of the Antarctic whale sanctuaries, especially since it is Australia’s Antarctic territory. They have every legal right to do so.

But the problem with governments is that they seem to be co-opted by trade agreements and considerations and that seems to be the bottom line so justice and legality take second place to deals that are being made.

GE: Are there any governments anywhere who have come out and supported the kind of actions that you are taking?

PW: We are working closely with the government of Ecuador to address illegal fishing and we have a boat full time in the Galapagos and our patrol boat is crewed by Sea Shepherd volunteers, naval personnel and Galapagonian park rangers.

We are working with the government of Columbia to protect Malpelo Island off the coast of South America. So we try and work with governments when we are able to do so but very few governments are motivated to do anything to protect marine wild life.

Even when you point out to so called sophisticated countries like Canada that [allow] bottom drag trawling, destroying habitats, and Canada is a good example where the northern cod population’s crashed and up to the day it crashed the Canadian government was insisting that it was a healthy population, well managed.

So really, what we have are these ministries and departments of fisheries who are compromised by the fishing industries. They are calling the shots, not the scientists.

GE: The history of humanity has been fairly destructive, what hope do you have for us being able to reverse that?

PW: Well I believe in living my life with the three basic laws of ecology. The first is living with the strength of an ecosystem – it depends upon diversity. The second is the law of interdependence that all those species are dependent on each other. The third is the law of finite resources, there is a limit to growth, the carrying capacity.

Right now our numbers are growing so fast we are literally stealing the carrying capacity for a species. They have to disappear for our numbers to increase, and we are taking up all the resources that they would otherwise use.

We are going to reach a point where we are going to go too far and the law of interdependence will kick in. Then we will find that we simply can’t survive on this planet alone and that we depend on all these other species to do so. If we can’t learn as a species to live with in harmony with all the other species then we will be doomed to extinction.

For the full transcript of this interview visit http://www.ebono.com.au .

Historically, these approaches have resolved massive health problems that killed or maimed large numbers of people. Medical workers delivering health services in poor countries point out that opposition to these programs is only present in countries where those programs have been successful. “These are middle class affectations,” wrote Lindsay Rae of World Vision in response to an anti-vaccination campaign.

The problem is, governments have lost the trust of the people because of decisions that benefit major corporations, sometimes at the expense of the general population. When the pharmaceutical company Baxter, which has the contract to produce vaccines for the avian flu, accidentally released the live avian flu virus in Europe last month, it unleashed widespread fear of a deliberate campaign to harm people in the quest for profit.

The enforced delivery of medical services plays into the conflict between holistic and chemical medicine. Concerted campaigns by the medical profession have persecuted women, pagans and traditional healers across four centuries. These campaigns have often been brutal and overtly paternalistic attempts to centralise authority, knowledge and access to important substances.

At the same time, the disappearance of diseases such as polio and the reduction in fatalities from general infections and common diseases is directly attributable to modern, industrial medicine.

How then do you, Dear Reader, come to a well informed decision on something like flouridation?

My view, based on the research of many others is that we need to apply the precautionary principle. If we don’t know the consequences we should not pop the pill. We certainly should not compell the entire population to swallow it. Flouridation may well improve dental health, but the costs to mental health and the general well being of the population will not be known for another century or so.

This article appeared first in the Northern Star.