TOXIC U.S.

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE

How toxic is American life? It's a very big question and certainly not one that can be covered in one lecture but we thought we'd compare some aspects of American life to the technology used by Nazi Germany in the Holocaust to organize the mass murder of the Jews and other people that they didn't like.

So let's get started. What gas did the Nazis originally use in their gas chambers.  Now they used carbon monoxide, the gas coming out of the exhaust of almost all the automobiles in America and around the world. In other words we have based our transportation system on a technology that generates the same gas used by the Nazis in their gas chambers. Carbon monoxide is one of the most deadly chemicals on earth.  It's very hard to revive a person if they have carbon monoxide poisoning.  Now the good news is that catalytic converters reduce this somewhat but definitely did not eliminated and cars remain an extremely deadly threat. So we thought we just point that out.

Now the story gets better. Carbon monoxide of was not adequate for the job of killing large numbers of people Fast  enough.  So creative minds and that's a Germany got to work and they came up with Zyklon B. What is Zyklon B Zyklon B was and is a pesticide now the structure of modern pesticides is directly related to Zyklon B such as VX and other forms of nerve gases. Indeed the chemical connection between these pesticides and so close that modern pesticide factories could be quickly converted to manufacturer the chemicals for chemical warfare

Here's a big problem. Nature is an enclosed system. If you generate something it goes somewhere. You can't just generate something toxic and say over to throw it into the trash. There is no trash in nature it's a self circulating system.  So the carbon monoxide goes into the environment the carbon monoxide goes into people. In the case of pesticides the pesticides runoff into the water supply, runoff into the rivers and lakes and ultimately into the ocean.  That's what they do. Indeed agricultural agribusiness pollution is one of the most serious forms of water pollution around the world. That is a fact. Another aspect by the way, of pollution from agribusiness is the runoff from fertilizers which leads to the enormous dead zones at the end of great rivers around the world. So this these things go somewhere. They don't disappear. Governments can't order them to disappear they cannot.

So what this shows us is that we need to have a safer form of mass transportation.   Electric cars need to be put in as government policy. In terms of agribusiness we need to do a rethink of the green revolution so-called green revolution. Now we are not opposed to all pesticides and were not going to get into a debate of which pesticide is good which pesticide is bad other than to say that we need to be paying much more attention to organic agriculture.

In conclusion we need to come down to a political point.  Ronald Reagan claimed he loved the magic of the marketplace.  The question is which marketplace was he talking about. Was he talking about some commercial marketplace or was he talking about the marketplace where powerful economic interests by and sell politicians?  Mr. Reagan is dead and we are not able to ask him that question but we do need to point out that the marketplace for buying and selling politicians influences government policy.  The fact that we have a transportation system that's based on toxic realities is a political decision.  It's not an economic decision or scientific decision, and it will only be rectified by good political decisions. Good political decisions instead of bad political decisions to change the incentives to use clean energy and the regulations. We're not going to get into the details but that's the basic point.

In the case of agriculture the entire structure in the United States of agriculture is rigged towards industrial agriculture.The regulations are rigged against organic agriculture. That needs to change. Huge amounts of money need to be spent on looking into ways to make organic agriculture better.  Huge amounts of money need to be spent to restructure the tax and regulatory incentives for organic agriculture. We want to point out that we are not per se against all forms of GMO's. If a GMO can be developed that requires less pesticide or less fertilizer or less water that is something we would be open to consider. Again we want to emphasize were not against all pesticides among other reasons for the fact that the world is so addicted to pesticides that you would have mass starvation if you instantly stop using pesticides. But you we need to make a change. We need to go in that direction and that can only be done by political regulation, new political priorities. This is the way out. This is the constructive solution to build a better future.