Naoto Matsumura, a 53-year-old fifth-generation rice farmer, returned to his contaminated home near Japan's Fukushima power plant to care for his cows:Courtesy of VICE.
UPDATE: Many of you asked where to donate to help Naoto and the animals he's caring for. VICE told me this: "This is the NPO organization that Naoto and his supporters run: http://ganbarufukushima.blog.fc2.com/. It's a Japanese website but on the middle-left there is donation information in English."
This 18-minute video by VICE Japan profiles Naoto Matsumura, a 53-year-old fifth-generation rice farmer who went back into the dead zone around Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant to take care of his cows (and pigs, cats, dogs, and ostriches), and then stayed there. If you're wondering why anyone would live in a place with >17 times normal radiation, Naoto, in the video, explains his rationale on moral grounds. Including this:
Our dogs didn't get fed for the first few days. When I did eventually feed them, the neighbors' dogs started going crazy. I went over to check on them and found that they were all still tied up. Everyone in town left thinking they would be back home in a week or so, I guess. From then on, I fed all the cats and dogs every day. They couldn’t stand the wait, so they’d all gather around barking up a storm as soon as they heard my truck. Everywhere I went there was always barking. Like, 'we’re thirsty' or, 'we don’t have any food.' So I just kept making the rounds."
As for the filmmakers, Ivan Kovac and Jeffrey Jousan, here's some of what they had to say:
The radiation dosage per hour inside Naoto’s house, as measured by the Geiger counter we brought with us, is two microsieverts per hour, and outside our reader spiked to seven microsieverts. When we asked Doctor Hiroyuki Koide at the Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute how bad this was for Naoto, he said, "Japanese law states that any location with an hourly dosage exceeding 0.6 microsieverts [per hour] should be designated as a radiation-controlled area and closed off to the general populace. Once inside a radiation-controlled area you can’t drink the water, and you really shouldn’t eat anything. It’s inconceivable to me that a normal person could live there."
All of the other ~15,000 residents of Naoto's town still live in shelters—except for Naoto and his animals. And they're not going anywhere, say the filmmakers.
Admiral Samuel J. Locklear, commander of the Pacific Command, talks to Sailors aboard Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Barry:US Department of Defense
As I wrote in Full Green Ahead in the current issue of Mother Jones, the US Navy is paying close attention—and giving far more than lip service—to the problems underway from a changing climate. But until now no one's said it quite so loudly as Admiral Samuel Locklear, commander of the US Pacific Command.
Locklear met privately with scholars at Harvard and Tufts universities on Friday and said that the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region is climate change, reports the Boston Globe, and that significant upheaval related to the warming planet is:
"Probably the most likely thing that is going to happen... that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about." Locklear continued: "People are surprised sometimes, [but] you have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea level. Certainly weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon 27 or 28 this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about 17."
What's really interesting here is that the US has declared the Asia Pacific region (and all its security issues from North Korea, China, Japan, and the South China Sea) its primary security focus. "After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly in blood and treasure," President Obama told the Australian Parliament in 2011, "the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region." Now Admiral Locklear is saying that among all those juicy potentials, climate change is likely to be the single biggest piece of trouble.
Cyclone Sandra in the South Pacific on 10 March 2013: NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz
To get a sense of how huge that is, listen to Ret. Rear Admiral Dave Titley, whom I interviewed for my Navy piece last spring, when he was Oceanographer of the Navy and director of Task Force Climate Change. He was pretty forthright then about the giant issues facing the Navy from rising sea levels and a melting Arctic (more here). So this is what he had to say Monday about Locklear's precedent-setting statement in Boston:
For those that follow climate change and national security, having the Commander of the US Pacific Command (Admiral Sam Locklear) highlight climate change as a significant 'threat' to his area of responsibility is a big deal. While other 'Combatant Commanders (specifically Africa and US Northern Commands) have talked about Climate Change, the Pacific Command (and its Commander) are a 'big deal' in the security world. This is the command that deals with China, the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula, Japan, etc. every day. So to put Climate Change on a par with those challenges—is very significant.
US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Ryan Mayes; white flag by Jan Jacobsen via Wikimedia Commons.
I reported in the current issue of Mother Jones on the US Navy's aggressive goals to reduce dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels (My Heart-Stopping Ride Aboard the Navy's Great Green Fleet). These targets include testing and scaling up of biofuels and conserving whatever energy the Navy does procure by using new technologies and good-old common sense—plus training a new generation of officers as "energy warriors."
So what's the sequester going to do to those initiatives, which former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta described as among his most important? I spoke with Tom Hicks, Deputy Assistant Director of the Navy for Energy. He told me that at this point all Department of Navy and Department of Defense programs are subject to cuts and civilian furloughs. But some programs weigh more importantly than others:
At this time of declining budgets, investments in the efficiency of our ships and airplanes and in developing alternative fuels becomes more important than ever. In many ways those investments provide savings to the Navy's fleet and to the Navy ashore. The way we budget, we've already accounted for the savings that were expected to be made in fiscal year 2013. If those investments don't happen we'll experience additional costs that we'll have to find a way to pay for in future years. So in a very real way we're going to be facing some bigger budgetary issues if we can't find ways to make those investments.
I know that energy remains one of the top priorities with the Secretary [of the Navy, Ray Mabus]. Certainly shipbuilding is probably foremost among his priorities. But energy is up there as well, in part because of what it provides us. For the fleet it provides additional combat capability and mission effectiveness, and it reduces our vulnerability to increasingly volatile petroleum markets. We had the [amphibious assault ship] USS Makin Island that just recently completed its maiden nine-month deployment. It went out with $32 million fuel budget and it returned back with $15 million saved over its planned fuel usage. That's because it has a hybrid electric drive [part gas-turbine-electric and part diesel-electric] and many other efficiency measures on board that allows it to reduce the amount of energy it needs to conduct its missions. To us, to the Secretary of the Navy, it's now more important than ever to maintain our level of investment in energy.
According to theWashington Guardian, the Navy is forecasting an $8.6 billion budget shortfall by the end of 2013, with plans to shut down four air wings, cancel or delay deployments of up to six ships, dock two destroyers, and defer a planned humanitarian mission by the hospital ship USNS Comfort to Central and Latin America, plus furloughs among its civilian workforce. So far, no mention of axing energy programs.
Permafrost—the ground that stays frozen for two or more consecutive years—is a ticking time bomb of climate change. Some 24 percent of Northern Hemisphere land is permafrost. That's 9 million square miles (23 million square kilometers) found mostly in Siberia, the Tibetan Plateau, Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, and other higher mountain regions.
Unfortunately, thawing permafrost releases massive amounts of methane and/or carbon dioxide. The question is whether that would happen over the course of decades or over a century or more. This short video from the Yale Climate Forum explains the current scientific thinking on just how close we might be to the lethal tipping point.
Meanwhile this 90-second permafrost primer from the Climate Desk explains exactly we want this northern freezer to remain frozen.
The map below shows land-based permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere. It also shows the subsea permafrost that underlies the continental shelves of the Arctic Ocean.
We really really don't want permafrost to melt since its emissions have the potential to dwarf our own. As the Yale Climate Forum video says, we have the theoretical ability to control our carbon emissions but none whatsoever to stop a permafrost tipping point once it's reached.
I'm strapped into my backward-facing seat on a COD, or "carrier onboard delivery" plane, the US Navy workhorse that ferries people, supplies, and mail to and from its aircraft carriers at sea. I cinch the four-point harness holding me in place. Then I cinch it some more. When it's as tight as it can go, an aircrewman walks by and yanks it so hard it squeezes the breath out of me. The hatch closes. Steam rises from the floor. Shit. I've watched the YouTube videos. I know what's coming. Takeoff, a 30-minute flight, then landing on the USS Nimitz, decks pitching, plane wings waggling, tailhook dangling from the underside of the aircraft to catch one of four arresting cables stretched across the flight deck. Since it's not hard to miss them all, the pilot will gun the engines at landing to enable an immediate relaunch. Which means that if he succeeds at trapping a cable we'll decelerate from 180 nautical miles per hour to zero in about one second.
To get to the Nimitz, 100 miles off Honolulu, our turboprop is flying a 50-50 blend of biofuel and standard JP-5 shipboard aviation fuel. The biofuel is made from algae plus waste cooking oil. This makes us part of history, my aircrewman says, players in what the Navy calls the Great Green Fleet demonstration of July 2012. It's paired with a three-year, $510 million energy reform effort in conjunction with the departments of Agriculture and Energy as part of a larger push to change the way the US military sails, flies, marches, and thinks. "As a nation and as a Navy and Marine Corps, we simply rely too much on a finite and depleting stock of fossil fuels that will most likely continue to rise in cost over the next decades," announced Navy Secretary Ray Mabus at the launch of the program back in 2009. "This creates an obvious vulnerability to our energy security and to our national security and to our future on this planet."
The Navy has set five ambitious goals to reduce energy consumption, decrease reliance on foreign oil, and significantly increase the use of alternative energy. Part of one target is to demonstrate a Great Green Fleet by 2012, and that's what's sailing this July day in Hawaii's cobalt-blue waters: a carrier strike group comprising an aircraft carrier, two guided-missile destroyers, a guided-missile cruiser, and an oiler. All are running at least partially on alternatives to fossil fuels: the Nimitz on nuclear power, the other ships on that biofuel-diesel blend. The 71 aircraft aboard—Super Hornets, Hornets, Prowlers, Growlers, Hawkeyes, Greyhounds, Knighthawks, and Seahawks—are burning the same cocktail as my COD. All of today's biofuels are drop-in replacements for marine diesel or aviation fuel and are designed to run without any changes to the existing hardware of ships or planes. "No [nation] can afford to reengineer their navies to accept a different kind of fuel," Vice Adm. Philip Cullom, deputy chief of naval operations for fleet readiness and logistics, tells me.
The Great Green Fleet is debuting at the 2012 RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific) exercise, the largest ever international maritime war games, engaging 40 surface ships, six submarines, more than 200 aircraft, and 25,000 personnel from 22 nations. For the first time Russian ships are playing alongside US ships, and naval personnel from India are attending. Many fleets here are sharpening their focus on alternative fuels and working to assure the formulations are codeveloped with their allies. "We've had dialogue with the Australians, the French, the British, other European nations, and many others in the Pacific," and they all want to take "the petroleum off-ramp," Cullom tells me. "We don't want to run out of fuel."
You can't live off the land at sea, which is why the Navy has always looked far into the future to fuel its supply lines; the job description of admirals requires them to assess risk and solve intractable problems that stymie the rest of us. Peak oil, foreign oil, greenhouse emissions, climate change? Just another bunch of enemies. So when the Department of Defense set a goal to meet 25 percent of its energy needs with renewables by 2025, the Navy found itself fighting on familiar ground. Four times in history it has overhauled old transportation paradigms—from sail to coal to gasoline to diesel to nuclear—carrying commercial shipping with it in the process. "We are a better Navy and a better Marine Corps for innovation," Mabus says. "We have led the world in the adoption of new energy strategies in the past. This is our legacy."
It goes beyond supply lines. Rising sea levels lapping at naval bases? A melting and increasingly militarized Arctic? The Navy is tackling problems that freeze Congress solid. What it learns, what it implements, and how it adapts and innovates will drive market changes that could alter the course of the world.
A USS Nimitz boatswain tests biofuel (top left) for use by F-18s and other fighters (bottom), as sailors aboard the oiler Henry J. Kaiser transfer biofuel to the Nimitz. From top left: Devin Wray/US Navy; Chris Bartlett/US Navy; Eva-Marie Ramsaran/US Navy
But not without a fight. Six weeks before RIMPAC 2012, Republicans and some coal- and gas-state Democrats tried to scuttle Mabus' Green Fleet by barring the Pentagon from buying alternative fuels that cost more per gallon than petroleum-based fuels—the biofuel blend cost more than $15 a gallon—unless the more expensive alternative fuels come from other fossil fuels, like liquefied coal. This tricky logic made sense to Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.)—"[The Pentagon] should not be wasting time perpetrating President Obama's global warming fantasies or his ongoing war on affordable energy"—even though seven years earlier Inhofe helped secure a $10 million taxpayer fund to test renewable military fuels, more than half of which went to a company in his home state. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) agreed, calling the purchase of biofuels "a terrible misplacement of priorities" and adding, "I don't believe it's the job of the Navy to be involved in building…new technologies." Mabus, who'd already bought the biofuels for the RIMPAC demo, fired back: "If we didn't pay a little bit more for new technologies, the Navy would never have bought a nuclear submarine, which still costs four to five times more than a conventional submarine."
En route to the Nimitz I've managed to snag a seat next to one of only two windows in the COD's dark cabin. Through the porthole I watch our transect over Pearl Harbor, the USS Arizona Memorial, and the sunken and rusting remains of much of the 1941 Pacific fleet. Beyond Pearl we climb over the Pacific Ocean, at 60.1 million square miles nearly half of Earth's total ocean area. That's a lot of territory over which to maintain maritime supremacy, while guarding the far-flung energy supplies needed to do it. Some 75 percent of the world's fuel travels by sea, with 20 percent passing through vulnerable choke points like the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Aden, many guarded by US forces. Partly in defense of those lines, the Department of Defense burns more than 12 million gallons of oil a day. About a third of the DOD's fix goes to float the Navy, the world's largest, with a battle fleet tonnage exceeding the next 13 biggest navies combined.
Admirals are required to solve intractable problems that stymie the rest of us. Peak oil, climate change? Just another bunch of enemies.
Out over the ocean my turboprop hums merrily along on its biofuel blend, and so do I, until I catch my first glimpse of the Nimitz out the window—a toy miniature in a turbulent bathtub. Suddenly 1,092 feet of flight deck wedged into a ninth the space allotted a commercial landing strip seems insanely small acreage. "Go, go, go!" shout two aircrewmen, their backs to me, waving their hands in the air. This is the signal to prepare for the controlled crash of a carrier landing. We jam our heads into backrests, cross arms over our chests, hook hands into harnesses, and wait. It's an unnerving interlude, all noise dampened by the cranial I'm wearing, a helmet with built-in headphones clamped so tight my jawbone aches. Goggles down, I await what I can't see. A minute drags by. Ferociously. Another. Inflatable rafts twitch in overhead cargo nets. Then the sounds of a mass pileup on a steel interstate. Legs whiplash in the air. An unidentified flying object clips my head. It feels exactly like a tragedy at 180 nautical miles an hour—only nothing breaks, burns, or drowns at the end of it. And now here I am, on an aircraft carrier cruising at 30 knots of speed, safe and sound.
It's the Navy, so there's history. The Great Green Fleet was named after the Great White Fleet launched by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907: four squadrons of 16 battleships painted bright white and manned by 14,000 sailors and Marines on a 43,000-mile cruise around the world. It was the first ever armada of coal-powered steam battleships built entirely of steel—the product of years of government subsidies paying three times the market rate to develop a fledgling American steel industry. When Congress moved to blockade the fleet's around-the-world funding, Roosevelt snarled at them to "try and get it back." So the fleet sailed to 20 ports on six continents over 14 months, boldly going where no US military had gone before and announcing the debut of the United States as a player on the World Ocean.
Illustration: Frank Stockton
Even then the fight over a newfangled Navy was old. For a time in the 19th century it proved so psychologically difficult to get away from sail that hybrid naval ships sported steam funnels alongside acres of snowy white canvas. Naysayers swore the Navy was giving up reliable propulsion for dangerous and infernal machines. The great 19th-century naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote: "Sails were very expensive articles…but they were less costly than coal. Steam therefore was accepted at the first only as an accessory, for emergencies." Acting on the principles Mahan laid out in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History—a seminal book in naval strategy—the United States methodically and expensively procured ports and territories around the world specifically for use as Navy coaling stations: Guam, Guantanamo Bay, Hawaii, Puerto Rico. Yet by the time the Great White Fleet sailed home again in 1909, the coal era was over and the Navy was converting yet again, this time to oil-burning steamships. It took a lot of oil to drive a steamship, and the realization that oil wasn't going to last forever dawned far earlier in the military than among civilians. To keep the Navy afloat as long as possible, Congress passed the Pickett Act of 1910, commandeering lands in California and Wyoming, and later in Alaska, as Naval Petroleum Reserves, some of which ultimately ranked among the highest-producing oil and gas fields in the country.
The same year the Great White Fleet sailed home, 24-year-old Ensign Chester Nimitz, the man destined to be the namesake of the nuclear-powered USS Nimitz, took command of an early submarine, the USS Plunger. It was a crap assignment; young officers wanted battleships, the sexy beasts of the Navy. But Nimitz was in disgrace for having run a ship aground in the Philippines. Derisively, he called his sub "a cross between a Jules Verne fantasy and a humpbacked whale." Yet he took the job seriously and began to lobby for an undersea fleet that ran more safely and efficiently on upstart diesel engines, in contrast to the gasoline-powered Plunger. By 1911 he had successfully skippered another energy transformation, overseeing the development of the first diesel submarine, the USS Skipjack, followed by the first diesel surface ship, the USS Maumee (an engineering task that cost him a finger). Thirty-five years later, as chief of naval operations, Nimitz changed the fleet's course once again when he championed Capt. Hyman Rickover's fiercely contested bid (Rickover's opponents reportedly exiled him to an office in an abandoned women's bathroom) to establish a nuclear-powered Navy.
"Every single time there were naysayers," Secretary Mabus has said. "And every single time those naysayers have been wrong."
It's Not Just a Job, It's a Venture!
Advanced biofuels now cost $4.55 per gallon to make. But the Energy Department projects that will fall to $2.32 by 2017, in part due to the Pentagon's early R&D investments.
The Navy, USDA, and the DOE are each spending $170 million on private-sector companies building biofuel refineries. Combined with $3.4 billion of existing private capital, this investment will lead to an estimated 26 new refineries by 2015. Another $53 billion in public-private investment is anticipated by 2022.
Military demand is helping to shape the early market and scale the advanced biofuel industry, which could help commercial aviation and other industries expand their use. This is not unlike how the Pentagon helped develop radar, GPS, and microchips last century:
Mabus has touched down aboard the Nimitz for the Great Green Fleet demo in a biofueled Seahawk helicopter. Wearing his flight helmet rakishly askew, looking more the politician than the former sailor, he's piped aboard with a time-honored bosun's whistle before passing through a hatch freshly stenciled with the Navy Energy Security logo, a blue and green wave. Maneuvers get under way on the flight deck where F-18s—today called "Green Hornets," with their nose cones striped green—are taking off at 60-second intervals. The entire ship, all 97,000 tons of it, shudders from the muscle of 67,000-pound warbirds shot into the air from steam catapults. Water for the catapults comes from the Nimitz's four distilling units, which make 400,000 gallons of freshwater daily, mostly to cool the twin nuclear power plants that allow the Nimitz to sail the seas for 25 years between uranium fill-ups. In the skies above, in perfect formation flybys, jet fighters buddy-fuel each other through a hose-and-drogue system. Off our bow, while all three ships steam at 13 knots, the oiler USS Henry J. Kaiser refuels the cruiser USS Princeton, off-loading the last of today's 900,000 gallons of 50-50 biofuel blend—the largest ever purchase of alternative fuel by the US government.
"We're seeing the Navy once again leading in the type of fuel we use and how we procure it," Mabus tells an all-hands assembly in the vast interior space of a hangar bay on the Nimitz. "Today shows we can reduce our dependency on foreign oil." The crew is jammed shoulder to shoulder: sailors in marine camouflage or "blueberries," Marines in woodland camouflage, aircrew in jumpsuits, deck crew in bold-colored turtlenecks that signal at a glance their jobs on the floating war port. It's so orderly and polite, what I imagine a small-town political rally of the 1950s to be, complete with stage bunting, an American flag the size of Kansas, and testy microphones. Except there's a giant ocean heaving by outside the bay door, advanced electronic aircraft parked in the wings, a cluster of admirals wearing Green Fleet caps on the stage (of the hats, McCain griped a week later: "I do not believe this is a prudent use of defense funds"), plus a handful of reporters, a few looking seasick. Today's demo is a milestone in Mabus' energy plan. But it's also a day for the sailors, one pilot tells me, since the media presence here will raise awareness among the rank and file better than anything the Navy itself says about the seriousness of its green purpose.
"You have the senior Navy leadership here today," crows Mabus, as the chief of naval operations, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, takes the stage to praise the crew of the cruiser USS Chafee. "What I saw today was theory of practice," Greenert says. "We didn't have some scientist come down into the engine room and say, 'One day you'll see this.' You hear it today and see it on gauges." He's talking about the technologies developed to further stretch whatever fuel the Navy procures: low-tech add-ons like stern flaps to reduce ships' drag and increase fuel efficiency; high-tech plug-ins like energy dashboards with Prius-type feedback on fuel consumption; energy savers like LED lighting; plus your basic turn-off-the-lights mindset. "If we deploy these energy efficiencies fleetwide," Mabus says, "we can save up to a million barrels of oil a year. And with what we're paying, about $150 a barrel, that's $150 million the Navy can save a year."
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