Tom Engelhardt 73

October 12, 2014
Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, Adrift in Oil Country
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Small tip for next spring.  I just saw Robert Kenner’s documentary film 

“Merchants of Doubt” (inspired by aremarkable book of the same name) that exposes the way a tiny group of scientists were used first by Big Tobacco and then by Big Oil to sow doubt and uncertainty on subjects ranging from the dangers of cigarettes to global warming.  The book was written by TomDispatch author Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (and she's a major figure in the film).  As a tale of scientific flim-flam artists and grifters, the movie manages to be both shocking and thoroughly enjoyable, with a cast of characters ranging from a magician to a right-wing congressman who came to accept the reality of climate change -- and lost his seat.  It’s a tale of our time, grim yet sometimes quite funny and a must-see when it hits your neighborhood in perhaps March of 2015. Tom]

Think of it as a Walrusgram written on the sand of a northwest Alaskan beach and sent to the planet.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic marine mammal aerial survey noticed themfirst, those 35,000 walruses that had come ashore in unheard of numbers because their usual sea ice has simply melted away.  The photos are dramatic.  You couldn’t ask for a clearer message from a species that normally doesn’t write out its thoughts on the subject of our changing, warming planet.

For those who prefer their science not from the walrus’s mouth (so to speak), there has been equally relevant news on the same subject lately from another species.  Think of them as scientists clambering ashore from a wounded world.  Only weeks ago, it was reported that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere hadreached record levels in 2013 and, perhaps even more unsettlingly, that oceans and terrestrial plant life, both major “carbon sinks,” wereabsorbing less CO2 than in the past.  Now, we have news that the oceans have actually been warming significantly faster than anyone previously imagined. The latest figures indicate that “the upper 2,300 feet of the Southern Hemisphere’s oceans may have warmed twice as quickly after 1970 than had previously been thought... [and that] the upper levels of the planet’s oceans -- those of the northern and southern hemispheres combined -- had been warming during several decades prior to 2005 at rates that were 24 to 58 percent faster than had previously been realized.”

None of this is good news, of course, not if you have any sort of investment in future generations living on a planet anywhere near as hospitable as the one we’ve been on for so long. But talk about dissociation. While those walruses were climbing out of the water and the scientists were reporting their latest grim numbers, in the American heartland thousands of workers shaken loose from other worlds have been heading for boom times in North Dakota and elsewhere in our fracklands. There, the exploitation of previously unrecoverable oil shale and natural gas deposits via hydro-fracking has pundits bragging about this country as “Saudi America” and the president aggressively planning to make “the oil weapon” a central feature in American foreign policy.

Between the two worlds, the one producing ever more fossil fuels amid a let-the-good-times-roll spirit of triumphalism and the one slowly melting down under the impact of what those fossil fuels release into the atmosphere, there sometimes seems no connection at all. Clear as the link may be, each of these worlds often might as well be located on a different planet.

TomDispatch’s Laura Gottesdiener had the rare urge to land on that other planet, the one most of us never experience that produces fossil fuels with such exuberance, and see just what we’re all missing. Here's her vivid report from the front lines of American fossil-fuel extraction.Tom

A Trip to Kuwait (on the Prairie) 
Life Inside the Boom 
By Laura Gottesdiener

At 9 p.m. on that August night, when I arrived for my first shift as a cocktail waitress at Whispers, one of the two strip clubs in downtown Williston, I didn’t expect a 25-year-old man to get beaten to death outside the joint. Then again, I didn’t really expect most of the things I encountered reporting on the oil boom in western North Dakota this past summer.
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