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The Plan was a 101-page document to guide the long-term future of the land we’d just conquered.  There was nothing in it about democracy or elections or safety.  There was, rather, a detailed schedule for selling off "all [Iraq’s] state assets" — and Iraq, that’s just about everything — "especially," said The Plan, "the oil and supporting industries."  Especially the oil.

There was more than oil to sell off.  The Plan included the sale of Iraq’s banks, and weirdly, changing it’s copyright laws and other odd items that made the plan look less like a program for Iraq to get on its feet than a program for corporate looting of the nation’s assets.  (And indeed, we discovered at BBC, behind many of the odder elements — copyright and tax code changes — was the hand of lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s associate Grover Norquist.)

But Garner didn’t think much of The Plan, he told me when we met a year later in Washington.  He had other things on his mind.  "You prevent epidemics, you start the food distribution program to prevent famine."

Seizing title and ownership of Iraq’s oil fields was not on Garner’s must-do list.  He let that be known to Washington.  "I don’t think [Iraqis] need to go by the U.S. plan, I think that what we need to do is set an Iraqi government that represents the freely elected will of the people."  He added, "It’s their country their oil."

Apparently, the Secretary of Defense disagreed.   So did lobbyist Norquist.  And Garner incurred their fury by getting carried away with the "democracy" idea:  he called for quick elections — within 90 days of the taking of Baghdad.

But Garner’s 90-days-to-elections commitment ran straight into the oil sell-off program.  Annex D of the plan indicated that would take at least 270 days — at least 9 months.

Worse, Garner was brokering a truce between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds.  They were about to begin what Garner called a "Big Tent" meeting to hammer out the details and set the election date. He figured he had 90 days to get it done before the factions started slitting each other’s throats.

But a quick election would mean the end of the state-asset sell-off plan:  An Iraqi-controlled government would never go along with what would certainly amount to foreign corporations swallowing their entire economy.  Especially the oil.  Garner had spent years in Iraq, in charge of the Northern Kurdish zone and knew Iraqis well.  He was certain that an asset-and-oil grab, "privatizations," would cause a sensitive population to take up the gun.  "That’s just one fight you don’t want to take on right now."

But that’s just the fight the neo-cons at Defense wanted.  And in Rumsfeld’s replacement for Garner, they had a man itching for the fight.  Paul Bremer III had no experience on the ground in Iraq, but he had one unbeatable credential that Garner lacked:  Bremer had served as Managing Director of Kissinger and Associates.

In April 2003, Bremer instituted democracy Bush style:  he canceled elections and appointed the entire government himself.  Two months later, Bremer ordered a halt to all municipal elections including the crucial vote to Shia seeking to select a mayor in the city of Najaf.  The front-runner, moderate Shia Asad Sultan Abu Gilal warned, "If they don’t give us freedom, what will we do?  We have patience, but not for long."    Local Shias formed the "Mahdi Army," and within a year, provoked by Bremer’s shutting their paper, attacked and killed 21 U.S. soldiers.

The insurgency had begun.  But Bremer’s job was hardly over.  There were Sunnis to go after.  He issued "Order Number One:  De-Ba’athification."  In effect, this became "De-Sunni-fication."

Saddam’s generals, mostly Sunnis, who had, we learned, secretly collaborated with the US invasion and now expected their reward found themselves hunted and arrested.  Falah Aljibury, an Iraqi-born US resident who helped with the pre-invasion brokering, told me, "U.S. forces imprisoned all those we named as political leaders," who stopped Iraq’s army from firing on U.S. troops.

Aljibury’s main concern was that busting Iraqi collaborators and Ba’athist big shots was a gift "to the Wahabis," by which he meant the foreign insurgents, who now gained experienced military commanders, Sunnis, who now had no choice but to fight the US-installed regime or face arrest, ruin or death.  They would soon link up with the Sunni-defending Wahabi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was committed to destroying "Shia snakes."

And the oil fields?  It was, Aljibury noted, when word got out about the plans to sell off the oil fields (thanks to loose lips of the US-appointed oil minister) that pipelines began to blow.  Although he had been at the center of planning for invasion, Aljibury now saw the greed-crazed grab for the oil fields as the fuel for a civil war that would rip his country to pieces:

"Insurgents," he said, "and those who wanted to destabilize a new Iraq have used this as means of saying, ‘Look, you’re losing your country. You’re losing your leadership. You’re losing all of your resources to a bunch of wealthy people. A bunch of billionaires in the world want to take you over and make your life miserable.’ And we saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, of course, built on — built on the premise that privatization [of oil] is coming."

General Garner, watching the insurgency unfold from the occupation authority’s provocations, told me, in his understated manner, "I’m a believer that you don’t want to end the day with more enemies than you started with."

But you can’t have a war president without a war.  And you can’t have a war without enemies. "Bring ’em on," our Commander-in-Chief said.  And Zarqawi answered the call.

Dr Reza Hashemi-Nezhad, School of Physics, University of Sydney is a
nuclear physicist and Australia's only expert in the field of
Accelerator Driven Nuclear Reactors which uses thorium as fuel. He has
been working in this field for 10 years in international collaborations,
with some of his research funding from Germany.

"Many of the concerns that people have expressed about nuclear energy
would be solved by using thorium instead of uranium to generate energy.
This would involve a new type of reactor called an Accelerator Driven
System. Apart from the fact that Australia has the world's biggest
reserves of thorium, the ADS using thorium does not produce plutonium
and can incinerate its own nuclear waste as well as plutonium and other
very long lived radioactive waste (such as that produced by the
experimental reactor at Lucas Heights).

"The nuclear waste produced requires only 500 years of storage time as
opposed to hundreds of thousands of years for conventional nuclear
reactor waste. In these reactors a meltdown like the Chernobyl disaster
is virtually impossible."

http://www.aussmc.org/Nuclear_energy_debate.php 

Green building is hard to pull off, because building is a deeply evolved social phenomenon — it’s one of the oldest human endeavors. Changing building practices, like adopting civil rights or democracy, is a long-term process.

Looking around the table at a recent design meeting, I noticed that the contractors were friends, the engineer was a local, the architect had known somebody in the hiring group for years. That’s why they got selected. They are not green experts, and that fact won’t substantially change over time. Owners need to learn to work with contractors who may not have green experience, but do have a willingness to change. The challenge is to insinuate greenness into what is really, ultimately, a family — not a business. The way to do that is not with a consultant.

What we’re dealing with is a habit — the habit of business as usual — and any habit is hard to break. The most successful programs (think AA’s 12 steps) break the process into manageable bites. At Aspen Skiing Company, partly in response to that contractor’s question, we developed a "Green Building Process" that shows our project managers and contractors exactly what steps they must follow. A similar set of guidelines could become part of LEED or an independent aspect of the U.S. Green Building Council’s work.

In a perfect world, you’d have the process, then you’d have the prescription (highly energy efficient building codes, or aggressive internal green goals), and then you’d have the certification system.

There are other ways to bring green construction to the masses. One is to change green building conferences so that they’re useful. Right now, they’re an aggregation of consultants, architects, planners, builders, or engineers trying to get work by showcasing their projects. They are incentivized against admitting mistakes. Instead, organizers should theme conferences around reality, not dreamed utopias, and invite speakers willing to get into the nitty-gritty of the process, willing to expose their faults and teach people how to avoid them. We need honest discussions, not sales jobs.

Changing codes — by lobbying elected officials to require better insulation, windows, and heating equipment — can, in one sweep of the pen, do more good than centuries of piecemeal green building. This is already happening in many progressive municipalities. Aspen and Crested Butte are two Colorado examples. The U.S. Green Building Council is currently moving its power and spotlight toward greening codes, probably the single most important step it can take to get the big-picture change we need now.

Ultimately, the success or failure of the green-building movement may hinge on how good we are at being teachers, not builders. In the classroom, it’s much easier to go through a checklist than to show how to build a green building. But it’s much more interesting and valuable (and fun!) when designers or builders tell war stories.

A man named Jack Aley used to guest lecture to environmental studies classes at Bowdoin College. He talked about the house he built in coastal Maine, and he always returned to one theme: "Passive solar! Face it south! Superinsulation! Thermal mass. It’s simple, it’s elegant." Jack heated his house with a small woodstove, but he said it was so tight you could heat the place by making love.

Jack is something of a Maine redneck, and maybe that’s what we most need to complement our integrated processes and biomimicry and LEED and lifecycle analysis: a redneck 10 commandments of green building that works for residential and commercial spaces alike:  

1. Don’t bother, unless you have a committed owner, sufficient time, the best goddam engineer, a willing architect, and a construction company that believes.
2. Be a bulldog! Establish clear expectations repeatedly enunciated, making it unmistakable what you care about and what you want.
3. Have a good bullshit detector: accept no compromises or excuses.
4. Use consultants in response to specific issues, as a way to help the design and construction team, not in a "Green God" capacity.
5. Forget the fruit salad (certification) until you’re done, then use it to see how you did.
6. Don’t forget the subcontractors; they are the ground troops.

    

7. Keep your eye on the ball — which is energy efficiency, not bamboo floors. Don’t fall in love with funky eco-products, and save biomimicry for tomorrow. For today, just get ‘er done right.
8. Superinsulate, caulk, and, for residential construction, face it south.
9. Be paranoid: have a third-party engineer inspect the heating and cooling systems in design and after construction. It’s common sense, like sending along a chaperone to your daughter’s prom.
10. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. At the end, go through all your mistakes and figure out how to avoid them next time.

And finally, the way to check your work, at least for residential construction: if you can make love and heat the house, you done good.

Auden Schendler is director of environmental affairs at Aspen Skiing Company

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