Scott Ritter, again, bomb Iran, choose which American city you want to see go down in retaliation….

Scott Ritter, former Marine and UN weapons inspector spoke at the Veterans for Peace National Convention detailing his concerns about US foreign policy towards Iran. Later, Amy Goodman, also present, interviewed Ritter.

Recognizing the importance of addressing the climate change crisis and reducing dependence upon foreign oil and gas, the US Department of Energy (USDOE) has launched an aggressive program aiming to meet 20% of America’s energy needs via wind by 2030. In conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the USDOE produced a study assessing the economic and environmental costs and benefits of achieving this goal.
The study can be read in its entirety at 20percentwind.org and concludes more than 500,000 jobs would be supported with an increase of 100,000 jobs in supporting industries and 200,000 more jobs through economic expansion at the local level. Other economic gains are expected annual property tax increases of $1.5B by 2030 and electric price stability.
Deploying wind energy and displacing fossil fuel powered plants will result in 825 million metric tons less carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2030. Power generation presently accounts for 40% of CO2 emissions in the US. Wind energy, unlike fossil fuel or nuclear generated power does not require water so water consumption will drop also.
The study focuses entirely on centralized wind energy or large wind farms despite growing and successful implementation of distributed renewable energy systems in Europe. Nevertheless, the study reveals that successful deployment of an additional 304GW of wind power to meet the 20% goal is dependent upon massive investment in the transmission grid infrastructure. Consequently, 19,000 miles of new 765-kilovolt (kV) transmission lines, for an estimated price tag of US $60 billion are being proposed to Congress by high powered energy players like T Boone Pickens.
Other challenges to the centralized model include the need to develop larger electric load balancing areas, in tandem with better regional planning to implement generation diversity. According to the study, the US must increase annual wind power installation by 16GW by 2018, within ten years. Obtaining permits from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and other affected agencies in order to build out the transmission infrastructure to support this growth can take up to ten years. This is one reason the European Distributed Energy Partnership (EUDEEP) formed to implement wide scale distributed energy production to avoid many of these barriers and costs.
Significantly, the study acknowledges that a “business-as-usual” approach will not meet these goals. A major national commitment to clean energy, CO2 reductions and independence from foreign resources is required at a grass roots level. From a grass roots level it will also be possible to demonstrate that wide scale distributed energy systems can work in the US not just Europe and elsewhere. Happily, there are several people working on making the South Coast of Oregon a model of energy independence that the rest of the nation can build upon.
Please permit me a little divergence from topic here but I hope that in the inevitable debates to ensue during an election year we can focus on issues and not stoop to exposing verbal gaffes and sartorial faux pas. If you want to criticize Obama, criticize him, a constitutional lawyer, for eviscerating the 4th Amendment with his recent vote on the FISA bill. Or criticize him for his hawkish view on Iran or his votes for emergency defense spending more than five years after the ‘emergency’, not because he said fifty seven states instead of fifty on the campaign trail.
Criticize McCain for not defending the 4th Amendment and not voting on the FISA bill, for voting against an increase in GI benefits and for voting to continuing emergency defense spending five years after the ‘emergency’. Don’t criticize him because he thinks Iraq and Pakistan share a common border, (a really wide border called Iran). The future of this country is worthy of better debate and time is too short to waste on anything less than serious issues.

About a year ago I was given some information about two special ops teams being deployed to Iraq near the Iranian border. These teams were reported to me as specialists in high level assassinations though that was not stated mission. Evidently, we have some confirmation that these teams may have been involved in some agita, to say the least. Video from Rawstory

This is all being done with the permission of Congress as reported in the Vanity Fair article

L ate last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

All week I have been flooded with reports that the official cause of the 2003 electrical blackout was not, as reported, untrimmed trees and overheated transmission lines. The largest blackout in US history, more than 9,300 square miles, may have been caused by Chinese hackers gaining access to networks controlling the electrical grid. US intelligence officials have advised the Cyber Security Industry Alliance that forensic evidence suggests the PLA (Peoples’ Liberation Army) was behind the blackout.

The planet as a whole suffered multiple electrical blackouts last week from Belize to Iran and Nicaragua to South Africa. Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in the UK lost electricity when nine power plants stopped working. Many of these outages are a result of fuel shortages and may have nothing to do with cyber hackers but all were exacerbated by the centralized grid system. In the case of the UK power outage, one plant, a nuclear reactor by the way, in the centralized electrical grid failed taking eight more down with it.

As yet, there is no suggestion that the UK outage had anything to do with network intrusion and the privatized utilities are mum on the cause stating disclosure might raise wholesale energy prices. There is strong evidence that a Chinese PLA hacker, attempting to map the Florida Power & Light network brought about the Florida blackout in February. These events are all strong national security arguments in favor of decentralized power generation.

Also, this week, I was sent photographs of the largest operating container ship in the world, the Emma Maersk. The Emma Maersk with its 207’ beam and cargo capacity of more than 14,000 containers chock full of televisions, tires, toys and appliances can traverse the Pacific in four days. This fast transit and refrigerated containers allow the ship to bring perishables, seafood and exotic fruits, as well as trinkets from China.

As the Emma Maersk and other containerized cargo ships off load in Seattle or Long Beach or San Francisco and return to China, they ride much higher in the water. The US has nothing to trade in return and the containers go back empty and our dollars and our independence go with them.

Outsourcing jobs to other countries has made the US dependent upon more than foreign oil. We have become dependent upon centralized cheap labor to satisfy our thirst for plasma televisions and cell phones and even food to the detriment of our own economy. Even worse, we then turn around and borrow back the money we export so eagerly to countries like China in order to finance our occupation of Iraq and corporate tax cuts.

The best way to shore up our local economy is to keep our dollars local. The best national security policy is to decentralize energy production, manufacturing and food production. Microgrids would be impervious to cyber attacks and we have plenty of clean wood waste locally to fuel combined heat and power generators that capture carbon emissions. Producing power locally means we have more dollars to reinvest in local infrastructure and to provide for social services.

Growing and eating local food is healthier and helps farmers here rather than factory farms in Asia. Frequently, I receive solicitations from foreign manufacturing firms to submit proposals on producing my wind turbine. My closest like kind competitor manufactures in Guadalajara for a fraction of our anticipated cost but we believe investing in the community and providing living wage jobs has long term benefits that exceed short term profits.

Nationally, the policy continues to support transferring our independence and security to countries like China. Here in Coos County the effects of US trade policies have been felt since the early ‘80s and the people have struggled and survived but just barely. It is time to dig in and convert our local assets into a healthy economy and stop importing, food, goods and energy and decentralize now, our independence depends upon it.

(hat tip/Janice)