Resource control

1. EARTH CONTROL:
POWER, RESISTANCE, AND
DEVIANCE
WITHIN A RESOURCE EMPIRE
PANOPTICON
By: Jason Thompson
thompj2@unlv.nevada.edu
goi.thompson@gmail.com
5/8/2015 Presented at UNLV

2. Book written with grant from: ERC
POWER
1959: International co-operation in the peaceful uses of
outer space

3. “several of the biologists, oceanographers, and atmospheric scientists who
advised governments on the 1977 treaty to ban military uses of environmental
modification—the ENMOD convention—were enlisted to craft the first major
reports on anthropogenic climate change” (Hamblin, 2013, p. 10)
The Cold War,
RAND, and the
Generation of
Knowledge
David Hounshell
asked military
funding distort
science?
WHY?

4. https://medium.com/@WhiteHouse/unleashing-the-power-of-data-to-serve-the-
american-people-198534d009a2
Unleashing the Power of
Data to Serve the American
People

5. “surveillance is too often regarded as a discrete
activity linked to concrete state aims rather
than a more general imperative to understand
and control both the earth and its inhabitants”
(Turchetti and Roberts, 2014, p. 2)
“Both superpowers, especially the US administration, conceived the capacity to monitor
the earth within a framework of control through strategic influence, without the need for
explicit sovereignty over colonial spaces. This led to the establishment of infrastructures
that routed signals from overseas outposts to central homeland units devoted to their
analysis. Human communications were—and still are—a miniscule part in this traffic,
which includes data from the oceans, the surface and interior of the earth, and the sky”

6. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/
06/10/bamford-nsa-
idUSL2N0EM0SG20130610
“Time and again over the decades, this
pattern has been repeated.”
So, once again, deals were made with
the major telegraph companies - the
Internet providers of the day - to
grant the SIS (and later the NSA)
secret access to their
communications.
Codenamed "Operation Shamrock,"
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/n
sa-prism-shamrock-history-spying-
telegraphs/

7. RESISTANCE
“only a satellite can keep tabs on nations
that resist such monitoring, JASON
scientists warned” (ClimateWire, Jan. 28,
2011). President Obama expressed what seemed like frustration at
the resistance of some countries to verification. “I don’t
know how you have an international agreement where we
all are not sharing information and ensuring that we are
meeting our commitments. That doesn’t make sense.”
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/416763/a-technical-solution-to-monitoring-chinas-co2/

8. A network of ground-based greenhouse gas monitoring stations,
weather balloons and satellites could make it possible to accurately
monitor the emissions of a country as small France or Germany–
without the need for invasive inspections, says Ronald Prinn, a
professor of atmospheric science at MIT. It would cost billions, but
without it, it could be hard to know if a treaty is actually bringing
down emissions as planned. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/416763/a-
technical-solution-to-monitoring-chinas-co2/
Second, even if developing countries are able to monitor their emissions, many
are wary that reporting emissions would open them to pressure to cap those
emissions—something they have strongly resisted. Third, countries such as China
publically state that concessions for an internationally verifiable monitoring
system are a direct infringement on their national sovereignty. Despite these
barriers, an agreement that focuses on emissions monitoring might be easier to
implement than an arrangement based on binding emissions reductions.
http://www.cfr.org/climate-change/global-climate-change-regime/p21831

9. Eco-Spying
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-
confe/6841880/Copenhagen-climate-summit-Barack-Obama-risks-
Chinas-anger-over-satellite-monitoring.html
Sovereignty issues object to signing because developed countries not cutting enough.

10. Deviance- GHG Unbelievers
http://ontario-wind-resistance.org/2015/04/17/wind-
leaseholders-may-be-on-the-hook-for-billions/
http://judithcurry.com/2015/04/07/draft-aps-
statement-on-climate-change/