[Marxism] Environmental contradictions

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, July 27, 2007
Anavilhanas Ecological Station Journal
In the Amazon: Conservation or Colonialism?
By LARRY ROHTER

ANAVILHANAS ECOLOGICAL STATION, Brazil — Depending on one’s point of 
view, the World Wildlife Fund’s financial support of a nature reserve 
here on the Rio Negro is either part of a laudable attempt to conserve 
the Amazon jungle — or the leading edge of a nefarious plot by foreign 
environmental groups to wrest control of the world’s largest rain forest 
from Brazil and replace it with international rule.

In 2003, after signing an agreement with the WWF and the World Bank, the 
Brazilian government created the Amazon Region Protected Areas program. 
Since then, more than a score of national parks and reserves covering an 
area larger than New York, New Jersey and Connecticut combined have been 
brought into that network and provided with an infusion of new funds.

The program’s objective is to set up “a core system to anchor 
bio-diversity protection for the Amazon,” Matthew Perl, the WWF’s Amazon 
coordinator, said during a June visit to the area, a sparsely populated 
archipelago of 400 islands northwest of Manaus. “It’s part of a strategy 
to buy time, bring each protected area up to certain standards of 
management and pool resources for monitoring and enforcement.”

But that effort has aroused the suspicions of powerful business and 
political groups in Brazil that want to integrate the Amazon into the 
country’s economy through dams, mining projects, highways, ports, 
logging and agricultural exports.

“This is a new form of colonialism, an open conspiracy in which economic 
and financial interests act through nongovernmental organizations,” said 
Lorenzo Carrasco, editor and co-author of “The Green Mafia,” a widely 
circulated anti-environmentalist polemic. “It is evident these interests 
want to block the development of Brazil and the Amazon region by 
creating and controlling these reserves, which are full of minerals and 
other valuable natural resources.”

Such views are widely held in Brazil, cutting across regional and class 
lines. In a survey of 2,000 people in 143 cities conducted in person in 
2005 by the country’s leading polling organization, Ibope, 75 percent 
said that Brazil’s natural riches could provoke a foreign invasion, and 
nearly three out of five distrusted the activities of environmental groups.

Winning the battle for Brazilian public opinion is crucial to any global 
effort to preserve the environment and, by extension, curb climate 
change. Brazil is the world’s fourth largest producer of the principal 
greenhouse gases; more than three-quarters of those emissions result 
from deforestation, most of which occurs here in the Amazon.

But the notion that foreigners covet the Amazon has long been widespread 
in Brazil, fed in part by anxiety about the central government’s tenuous 
control of the region. Those concerns have been exacerbated in recent 
years by the Internet, which has become a home for fabricated documents 
and declarations meant to convince Brazilians that their sovereignty is 
at risk.

The most notorious example is a widely reproduced map supposedly used in 
an American middle-school geography textbook. Rife with misspellings and 
errors of syntax of a type common to speakers of Romance languages like 
Portuguese, it shows the Amazon as an “international reserve,” and 
describes Brazilians as “monkeys” incapable of managing the rain forest.

Other spurious documents say that both President Bush and Al Gore made 
speeches during the 2000 presidential campaign in favor of wresting the 
Amazon from Brazil. Elsewhere, the documents quote an apocryphal 
American general, who leads an agency that the Pentagon says does not 
exist, as saying, “In the event Brazil decides to use the Amazon in a 
way that puts the environment of the United States at risk, we must be 
ready to interrupt that process immediately.”

Since the Iraq war began, accusations of American military designs on 
the Amazon are often invoked to denigrate environmentalists and their 
complaints about government policy. At hearings late last year on a 
proposed dam on the Madeira River, proponents distributed a map showing 
what they said were American “forward-operations locations” in the 
region meant to block Brazil’s development, including military bases and 
advisers in Bolivia and Venezuela, two countries not exactly on friendly 
terms with the Bush administration.

Some of the material circulating has been traced to right-wing 
nationalist groups sympathetic to the military dictatorship that ruled 
Brazil from 1964 to 1985. But in an unusual instance of former 
adversaries agreeing, organizations on the extreme left — even in the 
governing Workers’ Party — have also endorsed the notion of a foreign 
plot to seize the Amazon, as have some active duty segments of the military.

“Everything indicates that the environmental and indigenous problems are 
merely pretexts,” said a recent Brazilian military intelligence report, 
which was made available to The New York Times by a Brazilian who 
received a copy and who was concerned at the views expressed. “The main 
NGO’s are, in reality, pieces in the great game in which the hegemonic 
powers are engaged to maintain and augment their domination. Certainly, 
they serve as cover for those secret services.”

In reality, Mr. Perl, the WWF coordinator, said, his organization hopes 
merely to create a buffer around the nature reserve here through the 
creation of a larger “Rio Negro Conservation Bloc.” He said the idea was 
to protect the existing reserve by helping existing Indian reservations, 
state parks and nature reserves along the banks of the river to operate 
more effectively.

By 2012, Mr. Perl said, his organization and its partners hope to bring 
an area larger than California into the system. A fund administered by a 
Brazilian foundation that aims to raise $390 million and includes 
donations from the German government and others has been created.

In the mid-1990s, part of the area surrounding the archipelago was in 
fact declared a state park. But little was done to make that decree 
effective, and since then the federal government’s land-reform agency 
has settled 700 peasant families here and the Brazilian Navy, Marines 
and police have set up jungle training centers in the protected area.

“There is layer upon layer of claims, plan upon plan, and so this has 
become an area of conflict,” said Thiago Mota Cardoso, who monitors the 
park for the Institute for Ecological Research, one of the WWF’s 
regional partners. “It is ironic that this land belongs to the federal 
government, and yet the government does nothing.”

===

NY Times, July 27, 2007
The Energy Challenge
Navajos and Environmentalists Split on Power Plant
By FELICITY BARRINGER

BURNHAM, N.M. — For the Navajo nation, energy is the most valuable 
currency. The tribal lands are rich with uranium, natural gas, wind, sun 
and, most of all, coal.

But two coal-fired power plants here, including one on the reservation, 
belch noxious fumes, making the air among the worst in the state. Now 
the tribe is moving forward with plans for a bigger plant, Desert Rock, 
that Navajo authorities hope will bring in $50 million a year in taxes, 
royalties and other income by selling power to Phoenix and Las Vegas.

The plan has stirred opposition from some Navajos who regard the $3 
billion proposal as a lethal “energy monster” that desecrates Father Sky 
and Mother Earth and from environmental groups that fear global warming 
implications from its carbon dioxide emissions.

New Mexico, which has no authority over the tribal lands, has also 
expressed misgivings and has refused to grant the plant tax breaks.

The struggle is a homegrown version of the global debate on slowing 
climate change.

Developed countries are trying to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, 
the most ubiquitous gas usually linked to climate change, and argue that 
rapidly growing nations like India and China should avoid building 
coal-fired power plants. The critics’ targets say it is unfair to keep 
them from powering their way to prosperity with cheap and abundant coal.

The Navajo president, Joe Shirley Jr., said his tribe felt similar 
pressure. Mr. Shirley said the plant here would mean hundreds of jobs, 
higher incomes and better lives for some of the 200,000 people on the 
reservation. The tribe derives little direct financial benefit from the 
operation of the existing coal-fired plants and it has not yet invested 
heavily in casinos.

“Why pick on the little Navajo nation, when it’s trying to help itself?” 
he asked.

The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, teaming with 
local groups like the San Juan Citizens’ Alliance, point to 
environmental shortcomings in the federal government’s tentative 
blessing of the plant, as laid out in a 1,600-page draft environmental 
impact statement and an analysis by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The staff of Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democratic presidential aspirant, 
recently issued a statement saying that the plant “would be a 
significant new source of greenhouse gases and other pollution in the 
region” and that Mr. Richardson “believes, as planned, it would be a 
step in the wrong direction,” undoing his proposed reductions in emissions.

In 2003, the Navajo invited Sithe Global Power, a merchant power company 
based in New York, to build the $3 billion 1,500-megawatt plant with the 
Navajo-owned Dine (pronounced dee-NAY) Power Authority.

In most respects, the plant would be relatively clean, with emissions of 
mercury, soot and smog-forming pollutants lower than most such 
operations. But each year, it would emit 12 million tons of carbon 
dioxide, the equivalent of adding 1.5 million average cars to the roads.

Coal-fired electricity contributes more than half of the 57 million tons 
of annual carbon-dioxide emissions in New Mexico. Together, the two 
existing plants emit 29 million tons.

Tom Johns, a vice president of Sithe Global Power, said he, too, was 
concerned about climate change. Desert Rock, Mr. Johns said, would be 
part of the solution.

“Carbon is emitted when we use energy,” Mr. Johns said. “By not building 
one plant but another or by using older inefficient plants instead of 
new ones, we don’t solve the problem. The solution to carbon issues is 
to be more efficient in how we use energy.”

Worries about pollution from a new plant build on lingering concerns 
about the ill effects of previous energy exploitation on the tribal 
lands. Navajos have been sickened and killed by uranium tailings, 
leading the tribal government to ban uranium mining. Mercury 
contamination has led New Mexico to warn children and pregnant women 
against eating large carp and catfish from much of the San Juan River, 
which passes through the northeastern end of the 26,600-square-mile 
reservation. And the ozone levels in San Juan County, which includes the 
eastern part of the reservation, have exceeded suggested new federal 
standards.

Elouise Brown, a Navajo whose family is from the area around the 
proposed plant, has led a group called Dooda (pronounced dough-DAH) 
Desert Rock, Navajo for “No to Desert Rock,” in a seven-month protest at 
the site.

The tribal council voted overwhelmingly to back the project, but Navajos 
are divided, with each side claiming to speak for the majority.

“It’s not just that it’s so close to my house or my family,” Ms. Brown 
said. “It’s the pollution and what the impacts are going to be from the 
pollution to all the people that live there. Not only the people that 
live there, but it adds to global warming. So it’s going to be a 
worldwide issue.”

The fight, in one of the emptiest regions, echoes in many respects the 
debates over the more than 100 proposals to build coal-fired power plants.

Organizations like Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources 
Defense Council have the equivalent of strike forces criticizing 
proposed plants. They recently won a victory in Florida, where 
regulators rejected two plants.

A major Texas utility, TXU, was bought by a financial group that agreed 
to scrap 8 of its 11 proposed coal-fired plants.

The Desert Rock fight is complicated by the status of the Navajos as a 
sovereign nation within a nation. Although some federal approvals are 
required for the project to proceed, no state regulators can tell the 
tribe what to do. Even with their divisions, the Navajos are thinking 
big about the possibilities. The tribal council is trying to find banks 
to lend it up to $750 million to buy a 25 percent ownership stake.

The council also plans a transmission line to carry electricity from 
Desert Rock and, perhaps, future wind farms.

The arrangement would be lucrative for the struggling tribe, which earns 
$102 million a year, much of it from selling coal and other minerals, 
and $400 million or so in government grants. The new power line might 
help send electricity to 20,000 remote houses — one-third of the 
residences on the reservation — that lack it.

Local opponents, like Mike Eisenfeld of the San Juan group, are more 
concerned about potential health and environmental costs.

“Your conclusion when you read the federal environmental impact 
statement is things are so bad already that you won’t even notice 
another power plant,” Mr. Eisenfeld said.

Some backers of the plant hope that Desert Rock could be a proving 
ground for an experimental technology to reduce carbon emissions by 
capturing them and injecting them deep in the ground.

Mr. Johns of Sithe Global Power and Senator Jeff Bingaman, the New 
Mexico Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, 
expressed hope that the carbon-capture technology could be incorporated 
into the plant with an additional $1 billion investment.

The Senate Finance Committee approved a measure for a production tax 
credit of $20 a ton for sequestered carbon dioxide, and Mr. Bingaman 
said he was looking for bill to attach it as an amendment.

Mr. Shirley, the Navajo president, said he hoped that the plant would be 
running by 2012. That may be optimistic. The plans are subject to final 
approval not only by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but also from at 
least three other federal agencies. If they come, lawsuits are a good 
possibility.

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism