May 27, 2020

Updates; briefing slides; Zoom meeting planned; Santa Fe Midtown; what you can do; investing disproportionately in political failure

Permalink for this letter; please forward as desired. Prior letters to this list.
Home page; Press Releases; Bulletins;
Do your interested New Mexico friends and colleagues get these updates? To subscribe, they can send a blank email here. To unsubscribe, send a blank email here.  
To subscribe to our Main listserve (less frequent, more national policy and international content) send a blank email here. To unsubscribe send a blank email here.
Our blog: Remember your Humanity. Twitter.
Contribute. Volunteer if you can!
Contact us (Greg, Trish in main office, Lydia Clark in Santa Fe)

Dear New Mexico activist leaders –

Good afternoon, everyone.

May 19 meeting slides

Our Zoom meeting on May 19 was fairly well-attended; several people later said it was helpful. The slides we used, which correspond to the agenda sent in the previous letter, were posted after the meeting ("LANL’s proposed expansion and plutonium warhead core (“pit”) plans in context," May 19, 2020).

Out of fairness to those who attended, we won't post the recording Zoom made of this meeting and we will likewise not post recordings of future meetings. Just like in-person public meetings (but easier for people with computers to attend), people need to show up to participate in discussions. It's an elementary aspect of our public life, as Hannah Arendt so eloquently said (see the inspiring section on "Action" in The Human Condition, pdf, or the Stanford gloss under "Arendt's Theory of Action").

June 9 national Zoom meeting: let us know if you want to attend

We will have a nationally-advertised Zoom meeting, also mostly on pits but with more on national policy, on Tuesday June 9 at 5 pm MDT. Everyone who is interested is welcome at this virtual meeting, but because this will be more widely advertised and therefore with more potential for hacking and other mischief, we'd like folks to indicate their interest to us beforehand. Then we'll send the meeting ID and password to you. Please do not share them, especially on social media, but meanwhile do feel free to ask others whom you think might be genuinely interested to write us for what amounts to a virtual "ticket." We have space for 100 people.

We'll send this invite out more widely in a day or two, so you will get it again. To repeat, all genuinely-interested parties are welcome, no matter what your political or national security views.

Meanwhile we will discuss pit issues more thoroughly in next Bulletin, coming in a few days.

"What can I do?" This recent Action Sheet offers suggestions for New Mexicans

Please consider these suggested actions ("New Mexico's People and Environment -- or New Nuclear Weapons: Act Now before It Is Too Late") and forward them to any and all interested parties!

We really need volunteer help recruiting businesses, organizations, and churches to the Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production ! Call and write your friends, please. (For background see this letter.)

We are counting on you!

Santa Fe Midtown Project Update

Lydia Clark, our Outreach Director, has been keeping a close watch on this project -- as close as its uniquely-opaque and likely-illegal process allows. The Midtown project is in our view deeply flawed in its basic conception -- we don't like the notion of the City transferring this large, centrally-located site into private developers' hands, and we do not believe the City will be able to control its development and uses once it is transferred -- but our greatest concern is the keen interest in the site exhibited by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

LANL is rapidly expanding, or trying to do so, principally in plutonium warhead core ("pit") production. It is threatening to outgrow its 40 square-mile site and its 941 buildings. LANL needs thousands of new houses and apartments for the thousands of additional nuclear weapons workers it is planning to hire. It needs educational facilities to train its technicians. It may try to partner with educational institutions to do so at Midtown, now that it's plans for developing the whole Midtown site have fallen through.

NNSA and LANL need the cooperation, or at least the official passivity, of the City and County of Santa Fe in order to stand up their proposed plutonium pit factory at LANL. We know LANL and NNSA have been involved in secret meetings with Mayor Webber, City staff, political donors, and land developers as well as with other local government and state officials. We don't know all that has been discussed -- we just can't chase down every lead. This is a corrupt process, with a mere facade of openness.

Weapons are LANL's raison d'etre and growth sector ("Administration seeks 49% increase in Los Alamos nuclear weapons activities, 33% plus-up for LANL overall, press release, Feb 23, 2020). LANL does very little besides nuclear weapons (breakdown by program, last year), and can do very little besides nuclear weapons (in a nutshell; more explicit, see pp. 23-25; another discussion from a different angle).

What is going on is a form of enclosure -- and a plutonium gold rush:

(link to graph)

It's amazing, isn't it, that so many people in Santa Fe are apparently ready to welcome a new Rocky Flats Plant into their community. LANL damages many minds -- including in the so-called progressive community, which is overall quite confused about what LANL is, does, can do, does for New Mexico, and ought to do.

What's the alternative? Among the questions Lydia asked the developers was this one:

Santa Fe has an opportunity to create a center in which sustainability is a primary focus in every way. Are there any plans to include partners/businesses/education for sustainable programs in agriculture, energy - specifically alternative energy sources to fossil fuels, wind and solar projects, or other potential sustainable business?

No straight answers have been forthcoming.

Santa Fe City and County have no climate-friendly, community-resilience-oriented policies to speak of. We drift, and have now hit an iceberg, with 150,000 or so people on board. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed how frothy, unsustainable, or just plain distracting and dumb far too much of our economy really is. Yet "economic growth" remains a watchword, a shibboleth nobody is willing to challenge.

There is too little reality-based critical thinking available in our public political narratives, or from candidates, or through our electoral system -- so why do they absorb so much attention?

This is a big, important topic that this short letter is only going to acknowledge exists, not diagnose or offer much in the way of remedies. It would be an important first step, however, if more people acknowledged openly that there is a lot more amiss (and just plain missing) in our political narratives and campaigns than is usually admitted -- or implied by the vast attention being paid to these campaigns by well-meaning citizens.

Our slickly-packaged, heavily-financed political campaigns offer almost zero understanding of the issues, so nobody gets elected with a mandate for change. Quite the opposite, in fact. Once in office, do they and their parties work to reform the broken US election process -- say with rank-choice voting, a real breath of fresh air?

Many well-meaning citizens devote most of the political attention they have to elections hoping, like Charlie Brown, that Lucy will not move the football. The net result is to firm up business as usual, instead of changing it.

By "reality-based," I mean here the wider realities which are the matrix for human life and institutions, including our society, our economy (with its metastatic financial arrangements), and our political life. I mean living nature, geology, non-human life, chemistry, physics, ecology.

Our politics largely ignores the planet we live on and the likelihood of our continuing our present ways of life (which is zero, of course). Denial is not just encouraged -- it's required. Yet otherwise intelligent and caring citizens flock to embrace one or another reality-denying candidate.

Some of us seem to have stopped thinking. "We" invest hope in oxymorons like "economic growth," "economic development," and "green growth," none of which are or can be actual things.

Our elected "progressives" will seemingly do anything for "jobs," as if there were no alternative way to think about our economic affairs. As if Right Livelihood didn't matter (that's just some dead guy's morality, and everybody has their own truth, right?) and of course, as if climate collapse didn't exist.

We've learned to hate the other political party instead of listening hard to what truths may be on offer there. We embrace the "lesser evilism" offered by our own corrupt party, whichever that may be. Despite decades of evidence otherwise, we think that if we can just elect this or that party favorite, we can lift people out of poverty. A new day will dawn!

No doubt some of our electoral choices are important. But no elected official will be able to turn much if at all toward the light unless his or her supporters are willing to engage in a more rigorous, patient search for truth and demand the same from them, and unless our broken electoral system is repaired, ending control by corrupt party mafias.

The following couple of articles bear closely on reality-based issues we discuss in these letters. We found them valuable.

• "It Will Get Darker Before the Dawn," Paul Gilding, May 26, 2020, in full at Cockatoo Chronicles, text sans footnotes at resilience.org

Having a global pandemic with devastating economic impacts used to be one of these predictable  1 and catastrophic ‘black elephants’. Then it arrived – but we had chosen not to prepare. The others are now stampeding toward us, including climate change  2 , the collapse of the fossil fuel industry  3, social and economic inequality  4 , ocean and eco-system collapse  5, famine  6, mass refugees  7 and others. As well as their direct economic impact, many will also drive social instability, civil unrest, nationalism, debt and credit crises  8, protectionism, geopolitical realignment and military conflict  9 – further magnifying the economic consequences.

That these are all stampeding toward us is known. What is unknown is whether we – taking the lessons of COVID-19 – will now decide to make different choices. Will our political and business leaders decide to act? We will we demand they do so?

If we choose not to, the consequences are clear. While each event will have varying national, regional and global economic impacts; collectively, they risk merging into a mega crisis and triggering global economic collapse. That is an arguable risk. But there is near certainty they will together unleash devasting economic, security and social consequences.

So have we suffered enough yet? What would it take to drive the level of transformational change we need – not just on climate change but on inequality, ecosystem collapse and all the others impacts now so clearly on the horizon?

In considering this question, we should first recognise there is no real dispute on the risks. Very few question they are real and coming our way. ...

I don’t want you to think ‘We always figure these things out.’  I want you to face reality. We won’t act until we shift to what activist and writer Margaret Klein Salomon calls “Facing the Truth”. When we face the truth about the state we are in, what’s at risk and how bad it could get – we will act. But that moment is not here yet.

It will get much darker before the dawn. [emphasis in original]

• "The Light at the End," (Nafeez Ahmed, Yes Magazine, May 11, 2020) (sent by a journalist -- thank you)

A basic precondition for being able to cross the threshold is acceptance: recognizing that the system as we know it, including many established structures taken for granted, is now bound to fall away. There may well be much to salvage, but it is futile to expect that the neoliberal “normality” of endless growth from which the pandemic erupted can simply continue unimpeded. It cannot—and efforts to revive it will be systemically self-defeating.

When we emerge, we will have crossed a permanent threshold, from which there is no return, because there is simply no more “normal” to which to return.

That much is clear from the works of anthropology professor Joseph Tainter of Utah State University, whose seminal study, The Collapse of Complex Societies, showed how every new layer of complexity a civilization generates to solve its problems tends to generate its own new layer of problems, resulting in a vicious cycle of diminishing returns.

Eventually, a civilization gets too complex to sustain itself, and cannot but collapse.

Exactly how that collapse takes place—and the opportunities for renewal it brings—varies depending on the context. Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon, university research chair in the faculty of environment at the University of Waterloo, has shown how global industrial civilization is particularly vulnerable due to the tightly coupled nature of its highly complex financial, food, economic, and energy systems. This complexity heightens the probability that different “stressors” interact within the system to generate a system-wide “synchronous failure,” whereby multiple interconnected elements end up failing simultaneously.

In 2008, “synchronous failure” unleashed a perfect storm of oil price spikes, food price hikes, and climate-induced food production failures interacting with collapsing housing markets and banks. The interlocking crises paved the way for the Arab Spring, laying the groundwork for the collapse of Syria into internecine civil war, in turn driving an unprecedented mass migration crisis which played a key role in tipping over Western political systems into the mainstreaming of xenophobia (manifested in victories for Trump, Brexit, and beyond).

Today, the economic slump accompanying national lockdowns has yielded massive destruction in the fossil fuel industry. As global demand plummets, the crash in oil market prices has driven profitability to an all-time low—too low, arguably, for many U.S. shale companies previously skimming the edges of bankruptcy.

This is not a temporary blip. A dramatic contraction of economic activity will now be unavoidable over the coming 18 months at minimum—either due to relaxing restrictions and driving up death rates to a degree that collapses social and health care systems, or maintaining restrictions that keep economies flat. This means prices will likely be too low for the oil industry as we know it to survive. By the time supply constraints allow prices to rise, which would only happen when demand is able to rise substantially after the pandemic, much of the fossil fuel sector as we know it will be beyond repair.

This disruption of a global system dependent on fossil fuels poses a serious risk to food, manufacturing, and other supply chains that sustain business as usual. The devastating impacts are being experienced most acutely by the world’s most vulnerable communities. Poorer countries in Africa with health care systems debilitated by years of ill-conceived Western structural adjustment programs are caught between trying to implement lockdowns to save lives while staving off health infrastructure collapse, and the prospect of prolonged unemployment and food and water scarcity. The pandemic is exposing the massive structural inequalities in the global system that have remained invisible for so long.

Yet the only way forward is through.

Stay in touch, stay safe,

Thank you for your attention,

Greg Mello