President Obama will this week become the first African American President to make an official visit to an African country.

The most interesting fact is that he does not go to South Africa or Nigeria - the two countries that compete for the unofficial title of leaders of black Africa. President Obama decided to go to the oil producing belt of West Africa, and this cut out South Africa;  then he chose the unassuming Ghana, rather then the feisty Nigeria - the most populous black state and important partner of the US in oil trade.

Why? What does he teach in this visit?

Nigeria is a corrupt state to its bone. Even its son, the Nobel Price winning Wole Soyinka said that neglecting Nigeria was just the right medicine that Nigeria needed. He continued then with the shocking statement: “I’d ’stone’ Obama if he showed up in Nigeria and conferred legitimacy on its sorry government.”

Ghana on the other hand, a much smaller West African nation, as of now with little US trade, did hold fair multiparty democratic elections since 1992, and  has a history of incumbents stepping down once they reach their term limits.

Ghana is a beacon of hope to Africa and has produced the only two-terms African UN Secretary-General, Koffi Annan, who we hope will be at hand when President Obama arrives for a day at the end of this week.

Yes, we know, it is rumored that the US is interested in Ghana also as it is the newest arrival to the West Coast Oil-belt, and with China making inroads in the region, the US might be interested to establish here a military base as well as an oil trade relationship.

But even so, this US President showed preference for clean government if this is at all possible.

Africa watch and learn!

Chanukah is a Jewish “Fourth of July” and a most Zionist holiday. that was the only reference I found by putting to google the task “A Jewish Fourth of July” “The Jewish Week” - this even though the paper had such an article in its July 3, 2009 issue. That was quite a pitty because the column under Jewish Intelligence - Jinsider was actually very good.

The missing column was by Jinsider legal intern Zack Eisner and Rabbi Simon Jacobson and should have been available also at www.meaningfullife.com - but was not.

It starts by saying that though the Founding Fathers doid not go to Hebrew School, nevertheless Jewish wisdom can be found in the Declaration of Independence and in the US Constitution - and then goes through the following four points:

Unalienable Human Rights via “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.” That is clearly based on the Torah saying that all human beings are created in the image of God and are equal as persons - so it would also imply equality between men and women.

Faith via the Declaration of Independence and the First Commandment implying there is a creator even when going after the separation of church and state.

Justice via the 15th Amendment calling for due process of law, and the scriptures: “Hear both small and great alike. Do not be afraid of man for judgement belongs to God.”

Free Speech via the 1st Amendment, and in the scriptures the greatest men and women of faith spoke out and even challenged God.

We liked that column as it shows how the paper is moving away from self-centerd positions to issues of general interest by linking to the American society at large. This being stressed further in this week’s editorial dealing for the first time with the issue of Climate Change and a very good editorial it was indeed.

 ———-

First Step On Climate Change

The Jewish Week, by The Editor, July 3, 2009

Climate change is a difficult issue to grasp. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that the planet is warming and that the emission of greenhouse gases are a cause, but it’s hard to identify the milestones of these changes in our everyday lives.

Seriously addressing climate change will require sacrifices from all of us, never a popular notion with politicians in our democracy. And there are too many vested interests determined to fight any real attempt to reverse climate change before it is too late.

That’s why last week’s House passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act was such a landmark. The legislation is hardly comprehensive, and passage in the Senate is by no means assured, but it represents the first  real attempt by political leaders to deal with the root causes of climate change. Perhaps more importantly, it is an important first step in altering a national mindset that puts today’s economic comfort ahead of the planet’s future.

We are pleased to note that several Jewish groups, led by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, were active players in the fight for passage. The Orthodox Union played a role in ensuring that religious groups would get a share of the funding for environmental upgrades.

Addressing the crisis in a practical but aggressive fashion is crucial to giving future generations a chance for the security and prosperity we have enjoyed in our lifetimes. It is related to the essential drive for energy independence that will greatly affect Israel’s as well as our own nation’s future. It is a matter of social justice, since the world’s poor are being more adversely affected by the early consequences of climate change. And time is running out, many scientists warn, with the potential costs of inaction reaching genuinely perilous levels.

“We have only been given one world to live in and for too long humanity has not done its part to ‘till and tend’ the earth for future generations,” said JCPA president Rabbi Steve Gutow. “We must do a better job in reducing air pollution, cleaning up rivers and streams, and protecting the wilderness. Congress’ vote to move forward with the climate bill was a good first step.”

We agree. {Concludes Gary Rosenblatt - The Editor}

———–

Furthermore, this week’s Middle East political topics take into account Mr. Sarkozy encouraging Mr. Netanyahu to make changes in his government by returning Tzipi Livni to the office of Foreign Minister, which would mean replacing the Avigdor Lieberman party with Kadima in his governing coalition. There are reports on the Ehud Barak-George Mitchell meeting in New York, and on the ways the Obama Administration might figure its near future moves in the Middle East - these presentations - obviously with Israel at heart - are nevertheless seen from an angle that says what is best for the US.

———

So why are we excited?

For years (at least for the last eight years) The Jewish Week, like the Israeli government, had all its eggs in the Washington Administration basket when it came to questions of climate change/global warming as they were interrelated with a Washington sold all to the oil interests - and the Jewish lobby like the Israeli government, thought that it would serve them best by being on the side of oil and not stir the pot.

The climate change article/editorial is not just a first in Washington’s acceptance of a pro-climate bill,  but a first article of this kind in The Jewish Week - sort of an independence of having to look over the shoulder at what the oil lobby - Jewish and otherwise - wants them not to say. we would like to hope that now Jewish organizations will find that basically all what the scientists and the ethicists are saying on environment in general, and on climate change in particular, has been put in the scriptures a long time ago. The Torah asks us to take care of God’s creation - not just to get funded from stimulus money!

It boggles our mind how all these years the Jewish lobby, and the State of Israel as well, did not speak up on the issue of making the world less addicted to oil - there is no state on the planet that had actually more interest then Israel in reducing this addiction of the world economy to petroleum. We understood the politics and why they kept away from it - so this issue of The Jewish Week marks to us not just Amerca’s Independence Day - but you bet - the independence of the Israeli people as well, and we hope they will now start looking at what Israeli governing coalition would serve their interests best.

———

 

Having said the above, for some sort of balance, I want to add what “The Week” of July 3-10, 2009 quotes from Tony Judt, Professor at NYU and usually viewed as unfriendly to Israel, who wrote those things for The New York Times.

He says: Every Mideast peace plan presumes that Israel will have to disband its settlements in the West Bank,  but there is just one catch understood in Israel but not in Washington: “The settlements will never go.”

He proceeds and tells us that with 500,000 residents in those settlements, or 10% of the Jewish inhabitants of all of Israel, and with Maale Adumim now at 35,ooo and taking in more land than Manhattan, simply put, Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu will never dismantle them - so he asks - why does Washington pretend otherwise?

What above says is that a new start is neded for the handling of the Middle East negotiations - the building of a future by starting with negotiated final borders, and interestingly, it was the President of Arab-Americans who suggested recently that in order to allow for a start of negotiations - vertical increase of settlements could be acceptable for the time being, but not further horizontal structures.

 

The Japan Times, Saturday, July 4, 2009

Amano signals goal is to fight proliferation

By GEORGE JAHN
VIENNA (AP) The International Atomic Energy Agency picked Yukiya Amano as its next chief, ending a months-long succession battle to replace Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei for the watchdog’s top post.

After the agency’s 35-nation board made its decision Thursday, Amano touched on the devastation that U.S. atomic bombs wreaked on his country in pledging to do his utmost to prevent the spread of nuclear arms.

ElBaradei saw his agency vaulted into prominence during a high-profile 12-year tenure.

North Korea left the nonproliferation fold to develop a nuclear weapons program on his watch, and his agency later launched probes to get to the bottom of suspicions it was trying to make atomic weapons.

ElBaradei’s activist approach often rankled Washington, which had a strong preference for Amano, who was viewed by the United States as a technocrat amenable to pursuing a hard line on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Amano’s allusions to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pointed to a deep commitment to nonproliferation. And Japan keenly shares the U.S. concerns about Pyongyang’s nuclear threat.

Developing countries supported Amano’s rival, South African Abdul Samad Minty, who was considered ready to challenge the U.S. and the other nuclear powers on issues such as disarmament. They are generally supportive of Iran’s claims to having a right to nuclear power.

An initial session in March ended inconclusively, and Thursday’s meeting went down to the wire, with Amano, 62, winning only in the fourth round.

That and the fact that Amano barely eked out his victory, just clearing the required two-thirds majority, reflected a continuing divide between the two camps. The divisions have served as an obstacle in one of its key tasks — probing nations suspected of secret, possibly weapons-related, nuclear activities.

While Amano was born after the U.S. nuclear strikes that ravaged Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, he alluded to those events in brief comments to reporters, suggesting that as a “national coming from Japan” he would work particularly hard to reduce the threat from atomic arms.

Expanding on that theme in recent comments to Austrian daily Die Presse, he said he was “resolute in opposing the spread of nuclear arms because I am from a country that experienced Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Now his country’s chief delegate to the IAEA, Amano was previously his country’s senior official for disarmament and related issues.

Amano will be taking control of the IAEA at a particularly difficult time. Its nuclear investigations of Iran and Syria are both deadlocked, and it has no overview of North Korea, which is forging ahead with its nuclear arms program.

———–

Saturday, July 4, 2009

VIENNA (Kyodo) Amano was voted in as first Asian head of IAEA in sixth round of ballots.  Yukiya Amano, Japan’s ambassador to the Permanent Mission to the International Organizations in Vienna, was elected the next director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday.

Yukiya Amano

Amano, 62, won against South Africa’s Abdul Samad Minty after six rounds of voting, making him the first IAEA chief from Asia.

“I am very pleased with this support,” Amano told journalists after the final vote, adding that as the next director general he will do his utmost to enhance the welfare of human beings, ensure sustainable development through the peaceful use of nuclear energy and try to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

“For that, the solidarity of all the member states, countries from North and South, from East and West, is absolutely necessary,” he said.

Amano also said he will demonstrate Japan’s efforts to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

He will take the helm at the nuclear watchdog in December, after formal approval at its annual general meeting in September.

Challenges facing him after taking up the post will be the Iranian nuclear issue and the nuclear threat of North Korea, which conducted a second nuclear test recently.

Luis Echavarri from Spain dropped out of the voting process after the first round as he garnered the fewest votes.

Neither Amano nor Minty could secure enough votes in each of the four following rounds to achieve the necessary two-thirds majority, with Amano falling just one vote short.

However, in the sixth round, which was a straight yes and no vote on Amano, he finally managed to get a two-thirds majority, with 23 countries voting in favor and 11 voting against. One of the 35 countries eligible to vote abstained.

Thursday’s balloting was the second attempt to find a successor to Mohamed ElBaradei, who will leave office after 12 years at the head of the organization when his term expires in November.

Amano, who is married and speaks English and French fluently, joined the Foreign Ministry in 1972 and was appointed deputy director of its Disarmament Division in 1982.

He held several different positions in the ministry, including director of the Nuclear Energy Division and director general for the Disarmament, Nonproliferation and Science Department, before being appointed to represent Japan at the International Organizations in Vienna in 2005.

Japan backing was vital: The government was quick Friday to pledge full support to newly elected International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano, and may also make a financial endowment to the nuclear watchdog.

Israel struggles to adapt to a changing picture of Iran.
By Philip Stephens
The Financial Times July 2 2009

No one watches events in Iran more closely than Israel. Tehran has long been the abiding preoccupation, some would say obsession of political discourse in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Now the story line has changed.

At first glance the violent repression deployed by Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s regime in the wake of last month’s presidential election has been grist to the mill. The images of beaten and bloodied demonstrators have described vividly to a global audience Israel’s long-held view of the Iranian theocracy. Yet the implications do not all run in the same direction. The apparent fixing of the poll result and the subsequent crushing of dissent has also made the case for more rather than less engagement by the west.

Before one or two of my regular correspondents of a neo-conservative leaning accuse me of going soft on an authoritarian Islamist regime with nuclear ambitions, I should say that this point was made to me this week in Tel Aviv by a shrewd member of the Israeli diplomatic establishment and sometime adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – no friend of the ayatollahs, in other words.

The reaction of western governments to Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s determination to remain in power suggests a different course. The Group of Eight rich nations has issued a strong – by diplomatic standards – denunciation of violence against demonstrators. I am sure I was not alone in seeing a certain irony in Russia’s signature on a document affirming individual liberties. That aside, the condemnations of the suppression of peaceful protest – including those of the European Union and the US administration – were surely right in their rejection of Tehran’s flimsy efforts to blame the west for the flowering of Iranian democracy.

Mir-Hossein Moussavi, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s opponent, was not offering the radical departure in Iranian politics that some Republicans in Washington have chosen to imagine. The presidential contest was a power struggle within Iran’s revolutionary family.

That said, the popular reaction to the apparent vote-rigging has indeed changed the game. The authority of the regime has suffered irrecoverable damage. Few of those who took to the streets will believe that it was all an American, or even more unlikely, a British plot.

This observation was offered to me by another Israeli. Isaac Herzog, the Labour minister for welfare and social services in the government coalition, recalled the occasions when his famous father visited the Shah’s Iran during the 1960s. Chaim Herzog would report back that the Shah was living on borrowed time: the ruler had grown too distant from the ruled.

The same can now be said of the gulf between Mr Ahmadi-Nejad and Iran’s youthful middle classes, although, as with the Shah, the end may be some time in coming.

The earlier point made by the Israeli diplomat was that Iran was no longer the country the west had thought, or wanted to think, it was. The post-election scenes on the streets of Iranian cities would surely strengthen those who argued that the way to encourage Iran’s return to the international community was through engagement – by embracing the ambitions of the protesters rather than shutting them out along with the regime. No one could pretend that Iran was the monolith that is North Korea.

As for suggestions that Israel is ready to bomb Iran to prevent Mr Ahmadi-Nejad from getting his hands on nuclear weapons, the issue was now more complicated. “How do you bomb Neda?” the diplomat said, in a reference to Neda Salehi Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death on the streets of Tehran has become a symbol of the regime’s repression.

Mr Netanyahu would doubtless dispute this analysis, but the Israeli prime minister’s views no longer carry weight. Until my discussions this week with Israeli politicians and scholars from across the political spectrum I had not realised quite how comprehensively he had wrecked his own foreign policy.

If Mr Netanyahu had started out with a single strategic objective it was to engage Barack’s Obama’s administration in a joint project to put an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. As an academic sympathetic to the prime minister’s predicament put it, he wanted above all from Washington “a credible policy on Iran”.

No matter that no one quite knew what such a policy would have amounted to; focusing on Iran would have allowed the prime minister to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the back-burner and sidestep international pressure to accept a two-state solution.

That was the plan. And what has happened? Mr Obama upturned the argument: a deal between Israel and the Palestinians was promoted in Washington as part of the broad regional initiative necessary to deal properly with Iran. Worse, from Mr Netanyahu’s perspective, Israeli-US relations have been reduced to an increasingly bitter argument about his refusal to halt settlement building on the West Bank.

As for Iran, the US president has indeed stepped back from immediate engagement. Doubtless he has been influenced by those who argue that restoring relations with Tehran would “legitimise” Mr Ahmadi-Nejad. Much the same argument was heard a few decades ago about détente with the Soviet Union.

But Mr Obama’s options remain open, as do those of European leaders. They should listen carefully to the voices in Iran who want the country to join the modern world.

Before visiting Israel I heard a prominent, Tehran-based academic put the case well. The policy of isolating Iran, he said, played into the hands of the regime by allowing it to demonise the US and its allies and forestall, in the name of national security, the opening up of society.

Breaking into this vicious circle will not be easy. It will require from Mr Obama a willingness to expend more political capital in explaining that diplomacy is not a synonym for defeatism. Engagement may well fail to persuade Iran to give up its quest for full mastery of the nuclear cycle – an ambition, incidentally, that the ayatollahs inherited from the Shah. It might just persuade Tehran not to build a bomb. In any event, the alternatives are all worse – unless, of course, Mr Obama feels he should take some foreign policy advice from Mr Netanyahu.

 philip.stephens at ft.com

 Monday, June 29, 2009, The Foreign Policy Association of New York had an event with Mr. Richard J. Shmierer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State at the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs,  titled THE FUTURE OF US POLICY IN IRAQ.

Mr. Schmierer is an Arabic speaking Senior Foreign Service professional who served in Gemany, Saudi Arabia and Iraq where he was in June 2004 with the reopening of the US Embassy. in 2005, while with the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University he published a book “Iraq: Policy and Perceptions.” Then in July 2007 assumed the position of Director, Office of Iraq Affairs, and in June 2008 got his present position of Deputy Assistant Secretary.

Mr. Schmierer pointed out the importance of the milestone of the US policy of withdrawal from the Iraqi cities and called it a watershed day. The target is that by 2o11 all US troops will be out of Iraq and only diplomats and NGOs will come instead.

Further, he said that the center of gravity of US relations with Iraq will shift from security to economic development - there will be a growing effort to get the NGOs take over the main role he said.

January 2010 there will be national elections to council representatives and this will lead to a new Iraq leadership.

Iraq had a subsidized socialist economy that was inefficient - this economy must thus be restructured. They need foreign investment and are open to it but investors want to see first the infrastructure taken care of.

Today more then half of the Iraqis work for the government and what is needed for the future is an entrepreneurial economy. They have significant debt to the neighboring Arab States.

A question about capitalist takeover of the Iraqi assets was answered - every country is specific so is Iraq. Oil exports from Iraq can provide support for the Iraqi people - be this health care, education etc. There will be a ballance of support for the people and private enterprise. There is no such balance yet today so there is no support for the people either. Iraqis get now advice from the IMF and other sources, but it is that they could benefit from international investment in development. Ultimately it will be for the Iraqis to decide. The problem is the level of corruption. The US is not out of the reconstruction business altogether - what we support is capacity development.

A question about the composition of Iraq brought out for the first time the issue of ethnicities, extreemists, sunni terrorists - and that raises animosity

A question on how we are prepared to react to the Iranian events was answered that we are prepared to support Iraqi security forces to provide security for Iraq.

——–

As said, above event took place the day before the festivities in Iraq that the locals tried to view as a start of the “good riddance” process. That following day was also going to be the day when the Iraqi government intended to auction off for the first time oil development rites.

I obviously had mixed feeling about the way the US State Department explained the situation in Iraq.

(a) there was no single indication why the US fought so hard to keep the three parts of Iraq glued together - after all it was the outside Hashemite King imposed by the British, and the pipelines built by the British, that were the only reason that Iraq was formed in the first place.

(b) which foreign oil companies will be alllowed now to reenter Iraq. Will indeed the US gain anything out of this war, and if so how will the British and the Chinese look at what the US calls normalization?

I knew that we will soon find out where the wind blows, and we post this after the first indications we got - just a couple of days after that Iraqi independence  show.

———

First, let us see a British-experience reaction:

Iraqis are too shrewd to fall for an ‘invisible’ occupation.
By Priya Satia
The Financial Times, July 1 2009 20:03

We are at the beginning of the end. On Tuesday, US troops left Iraq’s cities, and in two years they will leave the country. Or so the official story goes. In reality, most of the “withdrawing” forces are merely relocating to forward operating bases where they appear to be hunkering down for a long entr’acte offstage in expensive, built-to-last facilities.

Still, Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, is touting this redistribution of American power as a “great victory” against foreign occupation, akin to the Iraqi rebellion against the British in 1920. The US media appear bemused at the comparison, as they continue to miss the point of the Iraqi insurgency. But Mr al-Maliki is more right than he knows about the historical echo: 1920 turned out to be a sad year for Iraq, as the brutal British suppression of that uprising inaugurated four decades of British rule, lasting until the 1958 Iraqi revolution.

Today, too, victory is tinged with fraud. And the Fallujah bombers – the “patriotic resistance” – know it. Mr al-Maliki may claim US participation in maintaining public order is “finished”, but everyone knows public order depends on Iraqi awareness of the offstage presence of US troops.

US operations will be suspended for a few days to promote the perception that Iraqi forces are actually in control; Ali al-Adeeb, a senior leader of Mr al-Maliki’s Dawa party, says the Americans will become “invisible”.

But Iraqis are too shrewd to fall for invisible occupation again; indeed, they never fell for it the first time. Tuesday’s withdrawals echo the cynical British grant of “independence” in 1932 more than Mr al-Maliki’s selective memory of 1920. Then, too, the foreign occupiers co-operated in the local government’s efforts to create an impression of sovereignty, while continuing to pull the strings of real authority behind the scenes. Then, too, Iraqis saw through the ruse. The celebrations of 1932 rang hollow as British aircraft continued to patrol overhead and British personnel were renamed advisors, trainers, liaisons – “the same individuals with new and supposedly thicker cloaks”, one British official confessed. Today, too, the thousands of troops that will remain in Iraq will be restyled as “trainers” and “advisers”; American aircraft will retain their free hand. Moreover, the Iraqi and US governments’ focus on appearances has increased their need for secrecy about the true number and nature of the withdrawals, compounding suspicions of foul play.

Iraqis worry equally about the loyalty of Iraqi security forces, who will remain under the sway of thousands of embedded US “trainers”. Their takeover of the violent security work of the former occupiers also renders them suspect.

In sermons last week, Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric, warned of American loyalists in the military and government. Echoing 1920s and 1930s speculation that violence was the result of British machinations, he blames recent explosions on an American conspiracy to justify the US presence. His sermons inspired marches in Sadr City with shouts of, “No, no to America. No, no to occupation. No, no to terrorism. Yes for independence”. The current withdrawals are not seen as a step toward independence but to more covert and thus even more unaccountably violent American control – like the post-1932 British period.

American officials should heed the cautionary tale of the past, unwittingly invoked by Mr al-Maliki’s bluster. As the British ambassador in “independent” Iraq realised too late, Iraqis “never swallowed the fiction that [the advisers] are maintained as much, more even, for their good than for ours”. Independence remained a mirage as British trainers refused to entrust critical elements of Iraqi security to their trainees for fear of compromising British security. Security itself remained a pipe dream. As the isolated trainers grew increasingly susceptible to a paranoid groupthink about Iraqi politics, it became impossible for them to accept real withdrawal. The fortifications that protect US trainers from their trainees threaten to create a similar bubble.

In 1932 as now, rhetoric about withdrawal was aimed at global as much as Iraqi opinion. Instead of attending only to appearances, stoking the fears of a people familiar with nominal independence, the US and Iraqi governments should deliver the reality Iraqis and Americans want: “Yes for independence.”

The writer is assistant professor of history at Stanford University and author of Spies in Arabia.

———

Then let us see about the oil development concessions:

The only bid that was accepted was by a BP group in partnership with the China National Petroleum Company. So, one could say that the US led war makes space back for the Brits whom the US skillfully helped dislodge years ago, as they did also in Iran - but this time, as easily foreseen, the Chinese with their money will be the main beneficiaries. With all the nice talk about the Iraqi economy - nothing except US troops on the ground, in this post Saddam era, will hold Iraq from an economic Chinese invasion - this like in Africa, and like in Latin America. It is essential! The sooner the US realizes, in this new G2 Interdependence with China, that the stomach for living on the barrel and the bayonet is gone, the high talk about US benevolent activities in Iraq has gone to the archives as well. Iraq will try to price its oil, then there will be an internal fight to distribute the spoils. The sooner the US decides to leave the scene to the Iraqis and their new friends, the better it will be for this country. The Saudis have just contracted the building of frontier-walls on the long Iraqi border, as well as on their Yemeni border.

———

EDITORIAL
The First Deadline

The New York Times, Published: June 29, 2009

After six bloody, ruinously costly years, there is an end in sight to the American occupation of Iraq. Under an agreement with the Baghdad government, American combat troops are to leave Iraq’s cities by Tuesday. President Obama has pledged that by Aug. 31, 2010 — 14 months from now — all combat troops will be out of Iraq and by the end of 2011 all American troops will be gone.

For a badly overstretched American military it will certainly be time to go. Repeated deployments have taken a huge toll on soldiers and their families. The Iraq war — an unnecessary war — has diverted critically needed resources away from Afghanistan, the real front in the war on terrorism. Many Iraqis are eager to see the Americans gone. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has declared June 30 to be a day of “feast and festivals.”
But there is an enormous amount to do — and not a lot of time — to help Iraqis prepare for the withdrawal and to reduce the chances the country will unravel as American troops leave.

We once hoped that a clear timetable for an American withdrawal would finally persuade Iraq’s leaders to make the political compromises that are the only way to hold their country together without an indefinite occupation. That has not happened. The Parliament has still not passed a law to divide Iraq’s oil resources equitably.

Indeed there are worrying signs that Iraqi politicians are doing the opposite — looking for ways to shore up their communal interests in case the civil war reignites. Many of Iraq’s neighbors are making the same calculations. Violence is down, but extremists are still trying to spark a new cycle of attacks and retaliation. In June, more than 300 Iraqis and 10 Americans were killed.

Mr. Obama was right to commit to a carefully paced and responsible withdrawal, and he was right to say that the United States cannot solve all of Iraq’s problems before it leaves. But we are concerned that Iraq may not be getting all the attention it needs in Washington.

The top American military commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, is a strong leader, and Christopher Hill, the new American ambassador in Baghdad, is a talented diplomat. Still, Mr. Obama has a high-level adviser for Afghanistan and Pakistan, for Middle East peace negotiations, and for Iran, but there is no marquee name for Iraq to ensure that the president and the bureaucracy are fully engaged.

We understand that for political reasons, in both countries, the United States cannot be seen to micro-manage events. But there are still many problems that need sustained and high-level American attention.

Iraqi Readiness Until a few weeks ago, American commanders were hoping that Iraq’s government would invite them to keep combat troops in certain Baghdad neighborhoods and in the northern city of Mosul, where sectarian tensions are high and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is still active. It didn’t, and Washington decided not to insist, given Iraqis’ sensitivities.

Most analysts give the American military training program good marks. They differ on whether Iraq’s army — still plagued by corruption, discipline problems, equipment shortages and security breaches — is ready to keep the peace in the cities. The police force and the interior ministry need even more work.

A January report to Congress by the Pentagon said that as of last fall, 17 of the Iraq Army’s 174 combat battalions were capable of conducting counterinsurgency operations without American support. All of Iraq’s army is dependent on the American military for intelligence, logistics and air support.

For now American troops — there are 130,000 in Iraq — are not going far. Baghdad’s sprawling Camp Victory has been designated as outside of the city limits, although it is just a 10-minute helicopter ride from the Green Zone.

Before American troops can really go, Iraq’s Army will need to develop enough of those missing capacities to be able to fight on its own. The United States is also going to have to help Iraq build an air force and a navy so it can defend its own borders — an effort that will stretch far beyond the 2011 withdrawal deadline.

Iraq is in a dangerous neighborhood, but it also has its own history of menacing its neighbors. Washington is going to have to decide how much firepower it is willing to sell Iraq, knowing that Baghdad can buy elsewhere.

Sunni Anger

Iraq is still awash in bitter resentments and the Sunni minority, which once dominated the country, is particularly resentful of the Shiite-dominated government. Areas with large Sunni populations are short-changed on services. Baghdad has not carried out a law allowing former members of the Baath Party to return to their positions or collect pensions.We are particularly concerned about the Iraqi government’s cavalier — or worse — treatment of the Awakening Councils. Those are the former Sunni insurgents who decided to switch sides, at Washington’s urging. Members have complained about delays in being paid. The government has barely made a down payment on its commitment to find jobs for the group’s 94,000 members in the security services, ministries or private sector.
Baghdad blames dropping oil prices and a budget squeeze for the employment problems. But keeping these fighters, and their relatives and neighbors, on the government’s side should be a top priority. Mr. Maliki has further alienated many Sunnis by ordering the arrest of several council leaders and a few high-profile Sunni politicians. Iraqi officials say the arrests are justified. United States officials need to impress on the prime minister the dangers he is courting.

Kurdish Ambition

Speaking privately, many American officials say they are even more worried about rising tensions between Arabs and Kurds in northern Iraq.

The disputes are over boundaries, oil and the power of Iraq’s central government. The autonomous Kurdish regional government insists that it has a historical claim to towns and villages in three provinces just over the present regional border that were forcibly purged of Kurds and repopulated with Arabs by Saddam Hussein. Since 2003 — often with Washington’s blessing — the Kurdish government has deployed its militia, the pesh merga, to some of these areas and spent millions of dollars on services in an attempt to assert its control.

Fearing displacement or Kurdish domination, Sunni Arabs have turned to hard-line politicians or extremists, including Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, to defend their interests. American troops have had to defuse confrontations between government forces and the pesh merga. Tensions are particularly high in Nineveh Province and its capital, Mosul. The Sunnis won the majority on the provincial council in January’s election and immediately stripped the Kurdish bloc, which came in second, of all positions and patronage.

The most dangerous dispute, however, is over control of the oil-rich, multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk and the surrounding province. In April, the United Nations issued a report with several options for Kirkuk, including making it an autonomous region jointly run by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens. Washington must press Baghdad and the Kurds to appoint responsible negotiators and urge them not to stake out extreme positions. If an agreement for Kirkuk cannot be reached, all three governments may have to consider outside administration, possibly United Nations-led, for some period.

Refugees One of the war’s great tragedies has been the forced flight of an estimated four million Iraqis — more than one out of 10 — from their homes. A small number, perhaps 100,000, have begun trickling back; a still smaller number have been permanently resettled abroad.

Millions live under extremely difficult conditions. Many are from the former Sunni elite. Others are Shiites whose mixed-population neighborhoods became Sunni during the upheavals of 2006-7. They all need the chance to return safely. Iraq needs their talents. Large numbers of refugees also put dangerous economic and political strains on Iraq’s neighbors.

Working out the politics and logistics of whether refugees return to their old homes (now occupied by others) or get new ones will require international aid and advice and enlightened leadership. While waiting for that to happen, millions of people need housing, food and education assistance. Syria and Jordan, which host the largest numbers of refugees, need continued international and American help. The United States needs to take in many more Iraqis, especially those who risked their lives to work with the Americans.

Governing More than anything, Iraq needs competent, inclusive government. To win public loyalties, the government must do a much better job of providing basic services to all Iraqis. With improved security, there has been an encouraging leap in electricity production, although there are still too many interruptions and shortfalls. Clean water is in desperately short supply.

American advisers have been working with Iraqi ministries, but United States officials say they are staggered by the lack of skilled managers and the pervasive corruption. Tackling those problems nationally and regionally must be a top priority. As American troops leave, the Pentagon must continue to provide security so civilian advisers can work throughout the country.Iraq’s politicians also need to show a far greater willingness to address and resolve long-deferred political problems. In February, on the same day he outlined his withdrawal plans, Mr. Obama said “ a lot of the ultimate outcome” in Iraq would depend on how difficult issues, including the oil law, are resolved. American officials now say that is unlikely to happen any time soon and they will be satisfied if legislators manage to pass a new election law in time for January’s national elections.
There are growing concerns that Prime Minister Maliki may be accumulating too much power, undercutting rivals and building a cadre of military and intelligence officers loyal only to him. Washington must make clear that it will not support any power grab and find ways to encourage other political leaders, while dissuading them from making their own power grabs.

Neighbors A stable Iraq is in the clear interest of all of its neighbors. Unfortunately few have seen it that way. Iran and Syria have meddled constantly — driving up the violence and backing off only when it looked as if the war could spin out of control and over Iraq’s borders or the Americans might retaliate. Tehran would still like to control Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government.

Meanwhile, many of America’s closest regional allies have withheld their support. Egypt’s Sunni-led government has only recently named an ambassador to Baghdad. Saudi Arabia’s Sunni royal family still has not.

Washington must do a lot more to persuade these allies that their interests would be far better served by building strong diplomatic and economic ties with Iraq. That is the best way to counterbalance Tehran. And with closer ties come more influence and more opportunity to help defend the interests of Iraq’s Sunni minority.

Relations with Tehran are particularly difficult right now, but at some point the Obama administration will have to renew its offer for dialogue. Iraq’s stability will have to be part of those discussions. We assume those discussions are already under way with Damascus.

The United States cannot fix Iraq. That is up to the Iraqis. But in the time left, this country has a responsibility and a strong strategic interest to do its best to help Iraq emerge from this disaster as a functioning, sovereign and reasonably democratic state.

The President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia.
Friday 03 July 2009
by: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  |  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con…
Mountaintop removal coal mining is the worst environmental tragedy in American history. When will the Obama administration finally stop this Appalachian apocalypse?

If ever an issue deserved President Obama’s promise of change, this is it. Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day - the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly - to blow up Appalachia’s mountains and extract sub-surface coal seams. They have demolished 500 mountains - encompassing about a million acres - buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region’s air and water. On this continent, only Appalachia’s rich woodlands survived the Pleistocene ice ages that turned the rest of North America into a treeless tundra. King Coal is now accomplishing what the glaciers could not - obliterating the hemisphere’s oldest, most biologically dense and diverse forests. Highly mechanized processes allow giant machines to flatten in months mountains older than the Himalayas - while employing fewer workers for far less time than other types of mining. The coal industry’s promise to restore the desolate wastelands is a cruel joke, and the industry’s fallback position, that the flattened landscapes will provide space for economic development, is the weak punchline. America adores its Adirondacks and reveres the Rockies, while the Appalachian Mountains - with their impoverished and alienated population - are dismantled by coal moguls who dominate state politics and have little to prevent them from blasting the physical landscape to smithereens.

Obama promised science-based policies that would save what remains of Appalachia, but last month senior administration officials finally weighed in with a mixture of strong words and weak action that broke hearts across the region. The modest measures federal bureaucrats promised amount to little more than a tepid pledge of better enforcement of existing laws.

And government claims of doing everything possible to halt the holocaust are simply not true. George Bush gutted Clean Water Act protections. Obama must restore them.

First, the White House should fix the “fill” rule the Bush administration adopted in 2002 to allow coal companies to use streams as waste dumps. Under this perverse interpretation of the Clean Water Act, 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been interred under mining waste. Obama could reverse the “fill” rule to reflect its original meaning, which forbids waste matter from being dumped into waterways.

Second, the Interior Department should strictly enforce the widely ignored “buffer zone” rule that forbids dumping waste within 100 feet of intermittent or perennial streams.

Third, our laws require companies to restore mined areas to their original condition. The administration should end the absurd fiction that extraction pits filled with unconsolidated rocks and rubble where trees will never grow and streams will never flow are “reclaimed.”

  Fourth, current law forbids the issuance of “fill” permits that will cause “significant degradation” to waterways. It is absurd for the Army Corps of Engineers to endorse the canard that filling miles of streams is not causing significant degradation. The president should require the Corps to deny and rescind permits where operations will cause downstream damage.

Fifth, the Clean Water Act requires mining operators to prove that they can restore the “function and structure” of affected streams. Operators have never been compelled to make the functional or structural analyses of the aquatic ecosystem required by the act. Obama should order his officials to stop ignoring this requirement.

Sixth, the administration should enforce the law requiring an environmental impact study for each permit when a mine “may have significant environmental impacts,” individually or cumulatively. The Corps of Engineers routinely allows coal operators to escape this mandate - an illegal practice that should stop.

Instead of acting to enforce these laws, administration officials indicated last month that they will allow more than 100 permits to go forward while they carefully review their regulatory options. If they act accordingly, the ruined landscapes of Appalachia will be Obama’s legacy.

President Obama should go to Appalachia and see mountaintop removal. My father visited Appalachia in 1966 and was so horrified by strip mining - then in its infancy - that he made it a key priority of his political agenda. He complained that Appalachia, with our nation’s richest natural resources, was home to America’s poorest populations, its worst education system, and its highest illiteracy and unemployment rates. These statistics are even grimmer today as mining saps state wealth. In 1966, 46,000 West Virginia miners were collecting salaries and pensions and reinvesting in their communities. Mechanization has shrunk that number to fewer than 11,000. They extract more coal annually, but virtually all the profits leave the state for Wall Street.

The coal industry provides only 2 percent of the jobs in Central Appalachia. Wal-Mart employs more people than the coal companies in West Virginia. Last week a major study documented how coal imposes a net cost to Kentucky of more than $100 million per year. Coal is not an economic engine in the coalfields. It is an extraction engine.

Obama has the authority to end mountaintop removal, without further action from Congress and without formal rulemaking. He just needs to make the coal barons obey the law.

——–

The writer is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Aspen Ideas Festival
June 29, 2009 - July 5, 2009
Aspen, CO

We watched on C-Span the Aspen Institute discussion and we deffer our reporting to David Brooks’ professionalism. Brooks defined himself as one of the last still active liberal Republicans. Others on that panel were two Wertheimers - Linda Wertheimer and Fred Wertheimer - both very centrist speakers.

Fred Wertheimer is founder and president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan organization that works to ensure the integrity and fairness of government decisions and elections. Wertheimer has spent more than 35 years working on money and politics issues and has been described by The New York Times as “the country’s leading proponent of campaign finance reform.” He is a national leader and spokesman on campaign finance, ethics and lobbying reform, and government accountability. Wertheimer previously served as president of Common Cause; as a Fellow at the Shorenstein Press, Politics, and Public Policy Center at Harvard University; as J. Skelly Wright Fellow and visiting lecturer at Yale Law School; and as a political analyst and consultant for CBS News, ABC News, and ABC’s “Nightline.”

 

Linda Wertheimer is a senior national correspondent for National Public Radio. Before her current post, she spent 13 years as a host of NPR’s flagship news magazine, “All Things Considered.” She has worked at NPR for more than three decades and has held various positions, including congressional and national political correspondent. In 1976, she became the first woman to anchor network coverage both of a presidential-nomination convention and of an election night. She has received numerous journalism awards, including those from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, American Women in Radio/TV, and the American Legion. Wertheimer has also received the prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. She is the author of Listening to America: Twenty-five Years in the Life of a Nation as Heard on National Public Radio (Houghton Mifflin, 1995).

NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED COLUMNIST
Chinese Fireworks Display.
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 2, 2009

On July Fourth, we think about our country and its future. But these days it’s impossible to think about America and its future role in the world without also thinking about China. This was the subject of a combative discussion this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

The agent provocateur was Niall Ferguson of Harvard. China and the U.S., he argued, used to have a symbiotic relationship and formed a tightly integrated unit that he calls Chimerica.

In this unit, China did the making, and the United States did the buying. China did the saving, while the U.S. did the spending. Between 1995 and 2005, the U.S. savings rate declined from about 5 percent to zero, while the Chinese savings rate rose from 30 percent to nearly 45 percent.

This savings diversion allowed the Chinese to plow huge amounts of capital into the U.S. and dollar-denominated assets. Cheap Chinese labor kept American inflation low. Chinese efforts to keep the renminbi from appreciating against the dollar kept our currency strong and allowed us to borrow at low interest rates.

During the first few years of the 21st century, Chimerica worked great. This unit accounted for about a quarter of the world’s G.D.P. and for about half of global growth. But a marriage in which one partner does all the saving and the other partner does all the spending is not going to last.

The frictions are building and will lead to divorce, conflict and potential catastrophe. China, Ferguson argued, is now decoupling from the United States. Chinese business leaders assume that American consumers will never again go on a spending binge. The Chinese are developing an economy that relies more on internal consumption.

Chinese officials are also aware that the U.S. will never get its fiscal house in order. There may be theoretical plans to reduce the federal deficit and the national debt, but there is no politically practical way to get there. Depreciation is inevitable and the Chinese are working to end the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

Chinese nationalism is also on the rise. The Internet has made young Chinese more nationalistic. The Chinese are acquiring resources all around the world and with them, willy-nilly, an overseas empire that threatens U.S. interests. The Chinese are building their Navy, a historic precursor to expanded ambitions and global conflict.

Think of China, Ferguson concluded, as Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the years before World War I: a growing, aggressive, nationalistic power whose ambitions will tear through pre-existing commercial ties and historic friendships.

James Fallows of The Atlantic has lived in China for the past three years. He agreed with parts of Ferguson’s take on the economic fundamentals, but seemed to regard Ferguson’s analysis of the Chinese psychology as airy-fairy academic theorizing. At one point, while Fallows was defending Chinese intentions, Ferguson shot back: “You’ve been in China too long.” Fallows responded that there must be a happy medium between being in China too long and being in China too little.

Fallows pointed out that there is no one thing called “China” or “the Chinese,” and that many of the most anti-American statements from Chinese officials are made to blunt domestic anxiety and make further integration possible. That integration, Fallows continued, is deep and will get deeper. Many, many Chinese leaders were educated in the U.S. and admire or at least respect it. If you go to cities like Xian, you find American and European aviation firms fully integrated into the commercial fabric there.

Fallows’s main argument, though, was psychological. When he lived in Japan in the 1980s, he said, he sometimes felt that the Japanese had a chip-on-their-shoulder attitude in which their success was bound to U.S. decline. He says he rarely got that feeling in China. Instead, he has described officials who are thrilled to be integrated in the world. Their mothers had bound feet. They themselves plowed the fields in the Cultural Revolution. Now they get to join the world.

Some of the officials interviewed by Fallows believe the U.S. is following unsustainable fiscal policies that will lead to decline, but they view this with frustration, not joy. Fallows doesn’t know what the future will hold, but he believes that Chinese officials still see the dollar as their least risky investment. Domestically, China will not turn democratic, but individual liberties will expand. He agreed that China and the U.S. will dominate the 21st century, but he painted the picture of a more benign cooperation.

I came to the debate agreeing more with Fallows and left the same way, but I was impressed by how powerfully Ferguson made his case. And I was struck by their agreement about what to do. This conversation, like many conversations these days, gets back to America’s debt. Until the U.S. gets its fiscal house in order, relations with countries like China will be fundamentally insecure.

Leading By Example This Independence Day.
By Jeff Siegel of Green Chip Living,  Friday, July 3rd, 2009

So here we are, gearing up for another Independence Day. The early fireworks have been going off all week, and the early corn tastes unseasonably sweet. Some will spend tomorrow attending 4th of July parades, some will park it in front of the television, and some will be working 4th of July sales. If you’re doing the latter, I feel for you.

Of course, even though I won’t be working tomorrow, I’ll inevitably be reading articles about how we need to declare our independence from fossil fuels. These obligatory articles seem almost too predictable at this point. Not that I’m complaining. After all, it’s important to be reminded of the fact that we truly are held hostage by our reliance on fossil fuels - particularly oil.

But I find that some of these articles can have a negative effect. In other words, if they become too preachy, folks tend to become defensive. And that’s the last thing we need. So when it comes to spreading the word about breaking the shackles of our fossil fuel dependence, I often refer to something my father told me at a very early age while doing chores - don’t tell me about, just do it.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about…

In the past, you’ve likely read something I’ve written about hybrids. Well, I not only write about them.. I also drive them. Not at home, because 95 percent of the time, I take public transportation. It’s just too easy not to. But when on business, if I need to rent a car, I always try to rent a Prius. And I do this because on nearly every single trip, someone will ask me - either genuinely or mockingly - how the gas mileage is. And it always brings me great joy to tell them. Especially on my last trip to Raft River, ID, when I inadvertently had our Prius cruising at around 85 to 90 mph. I’m not advocating speeding. But admittedly, I was very happy to report to a foreman at the U.S. Geothermal power plant that we still managed 41 mpg!

For me, it’s always been about spreading the word, and practicing what you preach.

So this Independence Day, I’m not going to write an article about declaring our independence from fossil fuels. I’m simply going to do my part to decrease my fossil fuel consumption. That means using the light rail to get to the fireworks display downtown, and buying only organic vegetables (that don’t use petroleum-based synthetic fertilizers) and local, grass-fed beef (which doesn’t have to be shipped from 1,500 miles away) for our cookout.

It may not end our reliance on fossil fuels - but it limits my contribution to it.

I do hope you have a fantastic Independence Day.

But before you head out to the fireworks or the parades, check out this week’s stories at Green Chip Living, including:

Fed works to speed solar development in Southwest

Senator Inhofe grasps at straws to continue his campaign of denial

10 Outrageous claims about Climate Change

Organic farming gaining ground in the South

Increase in renewables aids Human Rights

To a new way of life, my friends…

Jeff

Franny Armstrong Informs us that Scotland has become the first nation world-wide to comply in full with the IPCC CO2 emissions’ cut.  It is a 42% cut based on 1990 by 2020.

Compare above with the US 14% based on 2005 by 2020 - it is indeed more then 10 times the cuts suggested in the US House of Representatives legislation and 5 times the EU’s 20 by 2020 plans.

 http://www.christianaid.org.uk/ActNow/Co…

Scotland! Bonny, bonny Scotland has finally passed its own Climate Act, and in the process has become the first rich nation to commit to mid-term targets that are actually in line with the IPCC’s guidelines for avoiding that dreaded 2˚C threshold. Massive bigups to Stop Climate Chaos, WWF, Christian Aid and Friends of the Earth Scotland for all their work to make that happen, as well as everyone else who took the time to lobby their MSPs about this. Scotland actually now leads the developed world in climate mitigation policy. Who knew?

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/20…

      Scottish parliament agrees tougher 42% target to cut emissions.

Campaigners say ‘hugely significant’ vote to cut emissions by 42% by 2020 sets new ‘moral’ standard for the rest of the industrialised world

Scotland has set itself the world’s most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets after the Scottish parliament voted today to cut the nation’s CO2 emissions by 42% by 2020.
In a rare show of unity, all political parties at Holyrood unanimously agreed to fix the target as part of a radical climate change bill which also requires the Scottish government to set legally binding annual cuts in emissions from 2012.

The measures are tougher than the 34% target set in the UK government’s climate change act last year, which has no statutory annual targets. In common with UK government aspirations, the new act also commits Scotland to an 80% reduction on 1990 levels by 2050.

The campaign coalition Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, which claims its 60 member organisations represent two million people, said this “hugely significant” vote set a new “moral” standard for the rest of the industrialised world.

It comes the day after the US stated that a 40% cut by 2020 was “not on the cards”: developing nations have demanded this level of cut from rich nations.

Kim Carstensen, head of WWF International’s global climate initiative, said: “At least one nation is prepared to aim for climate legislation that follows the science. Scotland made the first step to show others that it can be done. We now need others to follow.”

However, the new measures are already under intense scrutiny. The act allows ministers to reduce the target later this year if the UK government’s advisory panel on climate change says it is unrealistic, or the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December fails to agree on a global deal to replace Kyoto.

Environment groups are critical of the Scottish government’s refusal to abandon road, bridge and airport expansion programmes, its plans for a new coal-fired power station, and its unwillingness to tackle directly increasing car use.

Furthermore, Scottish ministers only directly control about 30% of Scotland’s total annual emissions of 68m tonnes of CO2 – which only equates to a 700th of the world’s emissions. Most significant policies are controlled in Brussels and London, critics point out.

About 40% is covered by the European Union carbon emissions trading agreement, while the UK government has policy responsibilities for a further 30% of Scotland’s emissions. That includes fuel taxation, low emission vehicles, VAT on energy efficiency and air taxes.

The Committee on Climate Change, the panel set up to advise Gordon Brown’s government, has warned Salmond that Scotland is effectively jumping the gun by setting a 42% target in advance of a deal at Copenhagen.

In a letter to Stewart Stevenson, the Scottish climate change minister, the committee’s chief executive, David Kennedy, said it believes Scotland should follow the UK strategy of waiting until the Copenhagen conference.

If a deal is reached, it should follow the UK government’s lead and only then set a 42% target.

The Scottish government had also increased the pressure on itself by including emissions from international aviation and shipping in its target, Kennedy wrote, even though it has no control over policy for these sectors.

“I would therefore consider that an appropriate Scottish 2020 target could be set slightly below 34% to account for different treatments of international aviation under UK and Scottish approaches.”

Despite these criticisms, the chairman of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, Mike Robinson, said the significance of the all-party consensus could not be underestimated.

“It means Scotland’s climate change bill has the toughest target of any industrialised nation in the world and will be held up as an example, ahead of the climate talks in Copenhagen in December, of what can and should be done,” he said.

“This is a moral commitment and we hope other developed nations will hear this call for action and follow Scotland’s lead.”

Although on renewable energy the Scottish National party is very likely to surpass its ambitious targets to deliver half of Scotland’s electricity from renewables by 2020, ministers have failed to embark on any politically unpopular measures to combat car use or the growth in short-haul aviation.

It has authorised a second road bridge over the Firth of Forth and abandoned bridge tolls, paid to extend the M74 motorway, supports a new ring road around Aberdeen and dualing the A9 and wants a major new coal-fired power station.

Its most ambitious emissions-reduction policies, such as using carbon capture for all fossil fuel power stations, using marine energy, and a wholesale switch to green transport, either have targets set at 2030 or are largely UK-government controlled. The SNP has also completely ruled out any new nuclear power stations.

——————-

Scotland ‘Leads the World’ in the Fight Against Climate Change

The Scottish Parliament today (Wednesday 24 June) led the world by passing the strongest climate change legislation of any industrialised nation.

MSPs voted in favour of legislation that commits Scotland to:

at least 80% cuts of all greenhouse gases (on 1990 levels) by 2050
a 2020 target of at least 42% reduction in greenhouse gases
include the full effects of emissions from international aviation and shipping from the start
a strong duty on all public bodies to make a full contribution to tackling climate change
strong energy efficiency measures to tackle fuel poverty and save energy
Stop Climate Chaos Scotland (SCCS) has been campaigning for three years to see these key elements included in the Bill.

Mike Robinson, Chair of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, said: This is a truly momentous day. The Scottish Parliament has voted for legislation that will be held up as a positive example to the world ahead of climate talks in Copenhagen in December. An emissions reduction target of at least 42% and the inclusion of aviation and shipping from the start sets Scotland’s Bill apart from the UK Act. We hope other developed nations will hear this call for action and follow Scotland’s lead. Now that MSPs from all parties have made these moral commitments, they have a responsibility to do what is necessary to deliver them.

Stop Climate Chaos Scotland commends the Liberal Democrats and Greens for introducing robust targets early in the process and Labour and the SNP for their strong targets as the Bill neared conclusion.

—————
To the Editor:

Re “In Climate Change Bill, What May Become an Election-Year Issue” (Congressional Memo, June 27, The New York Times):

It is clear to me, having watched the climate bill debate in the House, that many Republicans simply do not believe that global warming is real, is caused by burning of fossil fuels and will lead to devastating consequences in a matter of decades if the status quo is maintained or actions to lower greenhouse gas emissions are inadequate.

This is reinforced in your article, describing Republicans “almost in a celebratory mood” at the close of the debate, believing they had gained a trump card to be used in future elections.

I can only hope that voters will take the time to read what the scientists are saying and see through the hot air offered by those politicians who deny global warming and deny the urgency of the situation.

Michael Yellin
Montclair, N.J., June 28, 2009

•

To the Editor:

“Betraying the Planet,” by Paul Krugman (column, June 29, The New York Times), recognizes that we can no longer afford to deny global warming, particularly in light of heavy Republican opposition to the Waxman-Markey bill that was passed in the House on June 26. Refuting global warming certainly constitutes betraying the planet, yet, surprisingly enough, so does supporting the bill.

A minority of the 212 representatives who voted against the bill did so because they considered the bill too weak. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that countries should cut their emissions by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Yet the short-term target in the bill offers only a 4 percent reduction by 2020, which just begins to signal the numerous problems with the bill.

Supporting this bill is a step backward and would only further betray the planet and give in to these global warming deniers.

Brian Howe
Manlius, N.Y., June 30, 2009

•

MONDAY, JULY 6, 2009
THOMAS G. DONLAN - EDITORIAL COMMENTARY  BARRON’S MAGAZINE

The Cap That Doesn’t Fit - A cap-and-trade system for reducing emissions looks great on paper. Did politicians feed their copies to the dogs?

FEW CONCEPTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS COULD be more logical and efficient than a “cap-and-trade” system to reduce emissions of a noxious substance. All it requires is competent authorities to decide, on the basis of the best scientific evidence, how much of the substance should be allowed to escape into the world. Then the authorities print up certificates allowing that much emission, which they auction for cash. The emitters then can buy and sell the certificates in a free market.

Emitters with no easy alternative will bid vigorously for certificates as a matter of survival, but an emitter with an easy alternative also will bid, because he can sell certificates after reducing his own emissions.

The market for certificates also will attract speculators and hedgers; the rapid exchange of cash will stimulate invention; every emitter who can reduce emissions will profit; there will be less of the noxious substance; and the world will be a better place.

Those industries that are low emitters and those that can easily curb their emissions will be winners. Emitters with no choices will have to buy certificates and they will pass their new costs along to their customers, or go out of business. Their customers also will be worse off if they have to pay higher prices or curb their use of products that can’t be made without the noxious emissions.

Thanks to the market for cap-and-trade certificates, the authorities and the citizenry will know they have done the best they can in the face of a serious challenge: Emissions will be lowered at the least possible cost, and everyone who benefits from emissions will pay for the reduction.

Theory and Practice

That’s the story in some economics textbooks. In the real world, it is hard to find competent regulators, harder to understand the best scientific evidence and hardest of all to determine what emissions actually are noxious. The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference. But in practice, there is.

The House of Representatives passed a cap-and-trade bill last month to control carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It’s considerably different from the textbook version of cap-and-trade. It is a remarkable case study in political science, focused on special-interest pleading and rent-seeking.

The bill, drafted under the supervision of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), is crammed with energy-wasting, money-wasting pet ideas. After promising to hand out 85% of the permits at no charge, the bill also provides loopholes and exemptions and escape clauses from the cap-and-trade system.

From coast to coast, the Waxman-Markey bill subsidizes, mandates and spends the taxpayers’ money on the ideas and industries dear to them and to a couple of hundred other congressmen. Markey and Waxman imagine cap-and-trade as a tax on business that won’t tax customers.

“Food Fight at the Carbon Trough”

Joining the congressmen in such absurdity are some major U.S. corporations. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership includes more than the usual environmental activists. Big energy producers and users are also members, including the former Big Three auto companies, ConocoPhillips, Alcoa, DuPont, and several big electric utilities.

Maybe they hope to have a voice in the shaping of the final legislation — a form of political-risk management. Some, such as General Electric and Siemens, may hope to reap subsidies for their green investments.

European businesses went along with a pan-European cap-and-trade system that started in 2005. That system has provided little reduction in carbon dioxide, but it has taught a few lessons.

The European regulators created too many emission certificates and they exempted 55% of greenhouse-gas emissions. The market set the price of certificates at nearly zero, and emissions increased under the system designed to reduce them.

After 2007, the system was tightened. Now the European authorities claim credit for reduced emissions, although the worldwide recession and the high energy prices of 2008 may also have something to do with it. Imagine how Congress will follow the European example. Not all emitters will have to have certificates — some will be more equal than others: small businesses, of course, especially small farmers, and individual car owners and homeowners and any other groups that vote in great numbers.

After that, industries and traders will be lining up and lobbying for the “free” certificates — always with the argument that one industry is unfairly hurt, or that another industry is extremely important to the economy and deserves a break. Kenneth Green, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, predicts “a food fight at the carbon trough.”

It will be just like the food fight at the defense trough, the food fight at the stimulus trough, the food fight at the tax-break trough, the food fight at the housing trough, the food fight at the health-care trough, the food fight at the poverty trough, the food fight at the oil-and-gas trough and at all the other troughs Congress has created.

No-So-Hidden Tax

In the current political debate, cap-and-trade has been denounced as an energy tax in disguise. It is, but raising energy prices is a sensible thing — probably the only sensible thing — if you want to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions or increase energy efficiency.

Higher energy prices are an effective incentive to conserve. Tradable permits, moreover, can work better than a straightforward energy tax, because the system can allow for winners and losers. A tax forces every energy user to cut back; the cap-and-trade system can push for the least efficient energy users to cut back the most and allow the most profitable uses of energy to expand.

Cap-and-trade will slow down economic growth and put some Americans out of work. But a properly designed system should be less painful than an energy tax, and far less painful than a regulatory mandate for equal reductions by all emitters.

If carbon-dioxide emissions are a real environmental problem, cap-and-trade should be the right economic solution. But, first, Congress has to read the textbook.

Editorial Page Editor THOMAS G. DONLAN receives e-mail at  tg.donlan at barrons.com.

—————–

Barron’s concludes: It is hard to find competent regulators, harder to understand the best scientific evidence and hardest to determine what emissions must be controlled. The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference, but in practice there is.

 

We liked the above Barron’s article and we also see a move at The Wall Street Journal that starts to see the truth in the danger from Climate Change - so the money folks start seeing the reality and even better - they start like in this Barron’s editorial - to makes positive criticism in the name of true free enterprise concepts - so the culprits are no more the scientists but the politicians and spcial interests with their manhandler Washington lobbyists legionaires.

 

Among the other self appointed speakers for free enterprise, we still find that The Cato Institute was left nearly alone as speakers for plain insanity as they still doubt that there is a man made global warming effect and distribute long lists of names with professorial titles (lots of them emeritus) addressing now President Obama with “all due repect - Mr. President, that is not true” notes on all what the vast majority of world’s scientists have already accepted as immediate needs for action.

But then, in utter disbelief, we founfd that Alan Reynolds of CATO is ready to accept a fuel tax if this is what will save that miserable US General Motors company that no way can measure up to today’s world without being propped up by the corrupt culture that allowed for its boom time.

We rather feel that it will be a time to danse when finally the curtain is drawn on GM.

See Mr. Reynolds, big Wall Street Journal OPINION piece for which he got paid - we hope.

Fuel Standards Are Killing GM: A higher gas tax is a better way to get green cars on the road.

By ALAN REYNOLDS

General Motors can survive bankruptcy far more easily than it can survive President Barack Obama’s ambitious fuel economy standards, which mandate that all new vehicles average 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016.

The actual Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) results will depend on the mixture of fuel-thrifty and fuel-thirsty vehicles consumers choose to buy from each manufacturer — not on what producers hope to sell. That means only those companies most successful in selling the smallest cars with the smallest engines will, in the future, be allowed to sell the more profitable larger pickups and SUVs and more powerful luxury and sports cars.

Sales of Toyota’s Prius, Yaris, Corolla and Scion, for example, allow and encourage Toyota to market more Lexus 460s, Sequoia SUVs and Tundra pickups in the U.S. without incurring fines. Hyundai’s success selling Accent and Elantra compacts allows it to sell 368-horsepower Genesis sedans.

Similarly, Ford has the Toyota-licensed hybrid Fusion and will soon produce the European Ford Fiesta in Mexico. Chrysler will soon have Fiats. But what does GM have?

No independent reviewer suggests that the Chevy Aveo and Cobalt are credible contenders in the small car field. Even the president’s auto task force finds the electric Chevy Volt “unviable,” since it will lose money unless priced above a Cadillac CTS. The Opel-engineered 2011 Chevy Cruze will face tough competition from Asian cars whose reliability is better established. Launching such new models will be even tougher in the future, now that GM has lost control of Opel.

GM accounted for about 19% of vehicle sales so far this year, but the company had a much smaller share of the market for small cars and SUVs (which accounted for 20% of total sales through May). To continue offering a Toyota-like array of larger cars and trucks under ever-tighter CAFE rules, GM would have to capture a much larger share of the market for small and/or diesel-powered vehicles. Unfortunately, European and Asian car makers have decades more experience building reliable subcompact cars and diesel engines for their local markets — where consumers face steep taxes on gasoline and large engines.

General Motors does produce competitive cars and trucks, but not one of them is small. Consumer Reports recommends three GM cars and three GM trucks. The recommended cars are the Chevy Malibu (the unrecommended hybrid has been dropped), the large Buick Lucerne and the Cadillac DTS. Consumer Reports recommends the Chevy Avalanche and Silverado and the GMC Sierra trucks. Car enthusiast magazines insist on adding Camaro, Corvette and the 556-horsepower Cadillac CTS-V to that list.

Among those nine best GM vehicles, only the four-cylinder Malibu achieved as much as 25 mpg in Consumer Reports testing. The others get 12-17 mpg, yet they are no less fuel-efficient than comparable foreign brands. The Environmental Protection Agency rates the mileage of the Toyota Sienna van and Nissan Titan pickup as worst in their class, and comparable Chevys as best. Unlike GM, however, Japanese car companies sell enough small cars to offset the large and thus hold down the average figures.

General Motors is likely to become profitable only if it is allowed to specialize in what it does best — namely, midsize and large sedans, sports cars, pickup trucks and SUVs. The company can’t possibly afford to scrap billions of dollars of equipment used to produce its best vehicles simply to please politicians who would rather see GM start from scratch, wasting more taxpayer money on “retooling” to produce unwanted and unprofitable subcompacts and electric cars. The average mileage of GM’s future cars won’t matter if nobody buys them.

Politicians are addicted to CAFE standards because they create an illusion of doing something sometime in the future without voters experiencing the slightest inconvenience in the present. Tighter future CAFE rules will have no effect at all on the type of vehicles we choose to buy. Their only effect will be to compel us to buy larger and more powerful vehicles from foreign manufacturers. Americans will still buy Jaguars, but from an Indian firm, Tata, rather than Ford. They’ll buy Hummers, but from a Chinese firm, Tengzhong, rather than GM. The whole game is a charade; symbolism without substance.

As a matter of practical politics, rescuing GM from strangulation by CAFE will require offering economically literate environmentalists a greener alternative, i.e., one that works. Luckily, the government has two policy tools that, with minor modifications, really could discourage people from buying the least fuel-efficient vehicles.

One is the federal excise tax on “gas guzzlers,” which could take some fun out of the horsepower race except that it applies only to cars, not to SUVS, vans and trucks. Why not apply this tax to all types of gas guzzling vehicles? Owners of trucks used for business could deduct the tax in proportion to miles used for business, as they do with other vehicular expenses. Phase it in after 2011 to encourage buyers to snap up the unsold inventory of gas guzzling trucks quickly — a timely “stimulus plan.”

Second, the federal fuel tax is highest on the most efficient fuel (diesel) and below zero on the least efficient fuel (ethanol). Cars get about 30% better mileage on diesel than on gasoline, and cars running mainly on gasoline get about 30% better mileage than they would using 85% ethanol.

To stop distorting consumer choices, simply apply the same 24-cent-a-gallon federal tax to gasoline and ethanol as we do to diesel. This would add funds to the depleted federal highway trust. More importantly, it would remove an irrational tax penalty on buying diesel-powered cars — arguably the most cost-effective way to improve mileage without reducing car size or performance.

These two proposals are a greener alternative to CAFE, because they’ll work. But they’ll only work if Congress totally and permanently abandons the charade of CAFE. It is arguably worthwhile to accept a modest tax increase in exchange for an end to harmful regulations, but that exchange is effective precisely because it is not painless.

Unifying fuel taxes and broadening the excise tax on gas guzzlers makes sense as an alternative to CAFE. Otherwise it’s just more pain with no gain.

If politicians insist on tightening fleet average mileage standards for bankrupt auto companies, how could those rules be enforced? The only penalty for violating CAFE rules is a big fine. If consumers keep refusing to buy enough small cars from GM and Chrysler to allow them to meet the CAFE rules, how are those companies expected to pay the fines?

The government is already planning to spend about $50 billion bailing out General Motors plus $7 billion for Chrysler. Will President Barack Obama provide Detroit auto makers with even more subsidies to pay CAFE fines?

Maybe so. That would be only slightly more bizarre than current plans to bribe folks with $4,500 to sell their “clunkers,” or to offer huge tax credits to those rich enough to buy a $73,000 hybrid Cadillac Escalade or an $88,000 Fisker Karma.

The bottom line is that CAFE standards are totally unenforceable and ineffective. Regardless of how much damage the rules do to GM and Chrysler, Americans can and will continue to buy big and fast vehicles from German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indian car companies. CAFE standards might just be another foolhardy regulatory nuisance — were it not for the fact that they could easily prove fatally dangerous for any auto maker overly dependent on the uniquely overregulated U.S. market.

Mr. Reynolds is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and the author of “Income and Wealth” (Greenwood Press, 2006).

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page  A13, Thursday July 2, 2009.

Helen Clark of New Zealand (former three term Prime Minister) and new  UNDP Administrator made First Visit to a donor country capital by going to Washington to meet  with officials from the Obama Administration, the House and Senate and major NGOs.

As well she met the Ambassadors from the Pacific community States.

To the Americans she explained that UNDP helps the US in its foreign policy - something that was not always the case under previous leadership in New York or Washington DC.

 http://www.us.undp.org/BulletinPDFs/June…

The United Nations mission in Iraq has condemned yesterday’s deadly bombing in al-Shourga market in Kirkuk, which killed and injured dozens of people, calling it yet another attempt to stoke up sectarian and ethnic conflict.

The attack is also aimed at “undermining the hopes of the Iraqi people for an improvement in their lives,” the mission, known as UNAMI, said in a statement issued today.

The mission “calls on all groups not to respond in the fashion that the killers want them to do: with revenge,” it added.

According to media reports, the car bombing took place in a predominantly Kurdish area of the northern city of Kirkuk on Tuesday evening, and led to at least 35 deaths and the wounding of 95 others.

The attack occurred on the same day that United States-led Multinational Forces withdrew from Iraqi cities, leaving security in the hands of the country’s own forces.

On Monday, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke out against recent attacks in Iraq, calling on the people of the strife-torn nation to reject attempts to incite further violence as it takes full responsibility for security in its cities.

“The Secretary-General notes that Iraq has been benefiting from an improving security environment, and appeals to the people of Iraq to continue to reject these attempts to incite further violence in the country,” his spokesperson said in a statement.

 http://democracyctr.org/blog/2009/06/amb…
 http://www.as-coa.org/article.php?id=173…

SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 2009
Ambassadorial Moves

Last September, in the midst of violence by opposition groups in the Bolivian departments of Santa Cruz and Pando, President Evo Morales accused U.S. Ambassador Phillip Goldberg of having a clandestine hand in that violence and ordered him out of the country.

That set off a chain reaction of diplomatic tit-for-tats. The Bush administration kicked out Bolivia’s ambassador to Washington, Gustavo Guzman, then “decertified” the Morales government’s anti-coca program and based on that cut Bolivia from the ATPDEA trade preference program. Unable to resist a good diplomatic mud-wrestling match with Washington, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez pushed himself into the game and kicked out the U.S. ambassador to his country as well, leading to the Bush administration’s ouster of Venezuela’s ambassador to the U.S.

By the time it was over. this diplomatic version of “screw you, no screw you“, left behind four embassies operating on auto-pilot, a path or torched diplomatic relations, and with the elimination of the trade preferences, thousands of Bolivian workers with their jobs on the line.

Well, this week, as part of the ongoing game of making nice between the Obama administration and the Chavez government, the two countries announced that they are returning their respective ambassadors to Caracas and Washington. U.S. Ambassador Patrick Duddy and Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez are dusting off their suitcases and getting ready to return to their former diplomatic outposts. This follows Obama’s and Chavez’s “all smiles” visit in April at the Summit of the Americas in Tobago.

So what about the diplomatic rift that started it all, between the Washington and La Paz?

Interestingly, even as Chavez, the supposed “bad boy” among the South American left presidents is rebuilding bridges, Morales’ moves with the U.S. are still sour. At Tobago, while Chavez was handing Obama a book to read, Morales was demanding that the U.S. President declare that his fingerprints weren’t on the alleged assassination conspiracy linked to four men killed by government troops in Santa Cruz.

So, will U.S. and Bolivian ambassadors be returning to their posts anytime soon? Certainly, the same ambassadors won’t be, as in the case of Venezuela.

Former Ambassador Goldberg probably wouldn’t choose to return to La Paz for all the saltenas in Cochabamba, given the constant state of combat between he and Morales. This week Mr. Goldberg was handed his new U.S. diplomatic assignment, leading the U.S. team in charge of implementing sanctions against the government of North Korea over its recent atomic tests. That probably fits Mr. Goldberg better anyway, who in Bolivia seemed much more at ease chastising foreign leaders than forming good relations with them, a task that Morales never made especially easy.

Former Ambassador Guzman, who I visited with a couple of months after his return to La Paz, probably wouldn’t head back to Washington for all the Starbucks coffee in Dupont Circle. He and his family, including a new baby, seemed quite happy to be back home in Bolivia once more.

This past week Secretary of State Clinton sent an emissary to talk with Morales, following up on a high level U.S. diplomatic mission here not long before. Clearly the Obama administration would like to get its Bolivian relations in order. Where Morales is on this is anyone’s guess.

But if an announcement between La Paz and Washington is forthcoming, akin to the one this week between Washington and Caracas, both countries will have to go through the process of nominating and approving a new pair of ambassadors.

In Washington that process will likely go smoothly, with few in the Senate likely to challenge whomever President Obama selects (I am betting on a Latino or Latina). In La Paz the case may be different. The opposition in the Senate already denied, last year, President Morales’ appointment of Pablo Solon as Ambassador to the UN (he now essentially serves in that post, but under a different title). That was pure politics, given the fact that Solon is probably the most able representative Bolivia could have in the U.S.

So watch in the next week or two for signs that Bolivia and the U.S. are ready to follow suit with Venezuela and refill the ambassador positions in their respective capitals. And then watch for it to get weird, as U.S./Bolivia relations just seem to have a tendency to do.

“The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity” - a book
by Sir Nicholas Stern as presented by Joanne J. Myers to the Carnegie Council - Ethics in International Affairs, New York City - May4th, 2009.

 http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcrip…

The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity.

Ma4y 4, 2009

Introduction JOANNE MYERS: I’m Joanne Myers, Director of the Public Affairs Program. On behalf of the Carnegie Council, I’d like to welcome our members and guests, and to thank you for joining us on this rainy Monday morning.
Today, our speaker is a world-renowned economist, Nicholas Stern.

Lord Stern is a man of many achievements. But the one that is most relevant to our discussion this morning is his work on climate change. Since the release of the 2006 Stern Review on the economics of climate change, commissioned by Gordon Brown when he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, this seminal document and the ongoing debate on this subject has made Lord Nicholas the man to turn to when questions about the costs and benefits of dealing with global warming arise.

In fact, from what I’ve read, it seems as if almost every significant discussion of climate change since has drawn heavily on his findings. This report has now been transformed into a book for the general public and is entitled The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity.

In focusing on the economics of climate change, Sir Nicholas shifted the debate away from polar bears and unseasonable summers and reframed the argument in the cold language of the balance sheet. In The Global Deal, Lord Stern evaluates our economic future and the essential steps we must take to protect growth and reduce poverty while managing climate change. He is guided by three principles, those of effectiveness, efficiency and fairness. By proposing green technologies, international emissions trading, and financing to halt deforestation, he lays out the technological and economic foundations for new industries by which he believes we can overt a catastrophe.

At the heart of his work is a simple calculation, which is if the science of climate change is right, the transition costs incurred by switching to low-carbon economy will, however daunting, be a fraction of what we will face by averting disaster. In other words, the cost of doing nothing about global warming would be very high, while the cost of transforming our energy system would be relatively low.

Climate change is often an awkward issue for governments to address, as the costs are immediate, while benefits only accrue in the future. Even so, understandings will be vital this year, as the world’s nations and their negotiators count down toward a UN climate conference to be held in Copenhagen in December. This is a target day for concluding a grand new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that reduced carbon dioxide and other global warming emissions by industrial nations.

While we may be a planet in peril and the global financial crisis could distract us from the bigger task of tackling climate change, Lord Stern sees global warming as an opportunity to bring forward investments in low-carbon technologies. In the long-term, these efforts could provide sustainable and well-founded economic growth.

Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to a very distinguished guest. We are honored to have you with us.

——–

Remarks

NICHOLAS STERN: Thank you very much, Joanne. That was a very kind introduction. And thank you all very much for coming today.

Since the Stern Review was published two and a half years ago, much of my time has been spent, since I’m back in academic life, arguing with my fellow economics professors about the best way to look at these issues. And we’re doing all right with that. They’re starting to understand just how big this is and what that means for the kind of economics that they have to bring to bear. So I sort of went back into academic life and wrote academic papers, which you wouldn’t want to read unless you’re heavily into mathematical economics.

But the other part of what I’ve been doing is working with people around the world, particularly in developing countries, which was the big part of my professional life before I got involved in climate change. In Europe, my own country the U.K., still part of Europe, and the U.S., for two years or so, I’ve been intensely involved in these discussions. And these have shaped, in large measure, the structure of the book, and indeed, my motivation for writing the book.

So what I want to do in the time I’ve got is to explain something about the global deal. How would we come to an international agreement to tackle climate change? What would it look like? What principles should it be built on? But before you can do that, you have to understand yourself why it is that you need such an agreement. But also, the quantitative analysis of why you need such an agreement actually shapes the agreement itself in very large measure.

So what I want to do is to begin with the logic of the problem, why it’s so important, the scale of what we have to do, because that shapes everything else. The scale shapes everything else, and the logic of the problem itself, because it’s a risk management problem, with long time lags. That also shapes the kind of agreement that we should be putting together and the difficulties in putting it together. So let me explain, from the beginning, in a very simple and fast way, I hope, the basic science, how that shapes the economics you should bring to bear to analyze the problem. And then on the basis of those things, what the global deal should look like.

I know that most of you are not economists. There’s a lot of economics underlying what I will say. I won’t go into it in any detail. The fact that you’re not economists is your fault. Most of you would have had the opportunity at some point in your life, and you didn’t take it. But I am not going to dwell on that. But those of you who are economists will recognize that there’s quite a lot of difficult stuff underlying what I have to say.

So here is the problem. It starts with people and it ends with people. People, through their lives, their production consumption, the way they live, emit greenhouse gases. They emit more greenhouse gases than the earth can absorb. And therefore, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rises. So there is a flow stock problem. And that’s critical to the logic of the whole thing. The flow of emissions, because they’re not fully absorbed, adds to the stock.

The next link in the chain is from the increase in stocks of greenhouse gases to temperature increases. That’s the very simple greenhouse effect. It’s a piece of science that goes back nearly 200 years now to French mathematician and physicist, Fourier. By the end of the 19th century, the gases that were causing this effect were basically identified, and there was some initial quantitative work on how big some of these effects might be.

The greenhouse effect is very simple physics and chemistry. Those of you who have been in a greenhouse will have noticed that it’s warmer in the greenhouse than outside. The very good reason is that the glass in the greenhouse prevents some of the infrared energy escaping, and that’s how the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere works. It’s not mysterious or complex or dubious science. It’s just a very basic physics and chemistry effect.

So from global warming, from increased concentrations, increased temperatures, from increased temperatures to climate change. And the language of climate change is the language we should use, not global warming, because it’s climate change that causes the problem. And most of it’s through water, in some shape or form. Storms, floods, droughts, sea level, sea level rise. The temperature does have a direct effect, in some cases, through heat stress, changing the length of growing seasons and so on. But basically, it’s the effect of the increased temperature on the climate that’s the issue. And, of course, those effects, storms, floods, droughts, sea level rise, have a very direct impact on people.

So that’s the logic of the problem: Key aspects of that chain of events—there were five links in the chain, you were counting, that I just described. The logic of that problem shapes the economics and the politics of it all in a very profound way. First, the atmosphere doesn’t recognize where the greenhouse gases came from. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Los Angeles or Beijing or Johannesberg or London. They have the same effect. It’s global in its origins and it’s global in its impact. That global feature of the problem is absolutely fundamental.

There are lots of things that we do in life that damage what other people can do. When we take our car out, we slow other people down. If we emit, as we did in London and many other places, soot from coal fires, we give people bronchitis and heart disease. But you can see, in a very direct way, how these effects are working. They’re local, and the effects are fairly observable, and they’re fairly immediate. This is a global problem and many of these effects have long legs. So the links in the chain I describe, some of them take years or even decades to manifest themselves. That, again, affects the politics of all of this in a fairly profound way. So by the time you see these effects with their full force, it’s actually too late to head many of them off.

So you can see the way in which the logical structure here has a profound effect on what you should do and how you should do it and how you see your relationships with others. Also, this flow stock story is critical because it means the costs of delay are immense. When you have a collapse of WTO talks, as we do in life, you get together five years later, and it’s a pity that you lost those five years, but you resume roughly where you were. This is not the case with climate change, because you would have had those increased flows which increase the stocks. And you’re in a more difficult starting point five years down the track.

So this logical structure, the problem, is very important in what you can do in the politics of it all. I’ll come back to that in just a moment in one or two respects, although it runs right through what I’m saying in the book. But let me just describe the magnitude. And here, you will need a little bit of mental arithmetic. It’s not hard stuff. But it’s very important that we get a feel for the numbers. We start around where we are now, around 435 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. That’s the measure of the stock, the concentrations, at the moment, 435 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. 380-something of that is CO2. And then the rest is other greenhouse gases translated into CO2 equivalent. We’re adding about two and a half parts per million a year. And that two and a half is rising. So since the two and a half we’re adding a year is rising, averaged over a century, we would be adding, on average, well over three parts per million a year. So a century of that, it’s a bit over 300. Add a bit over 300 to 435. If we didn’t do much, at the end of the century, we’d be about 750 parts per million.

If we stopped it right there, what would the temperature eventually be within a decade or two or three? It would be about probably around five degrees centigrade, or roughly 50/50 probability of being above or below five degrees centigrade. All of this has to be expressed in probability. This is a risk management issue. What does five degrees centigrade look like? Well, we’re not sure because we haven’t been there for about 30 million years as a planet. We’ve experienced five degrees below that quite often. Well, very recently, actually, 10 or 12,000 years ago, the last Ice Age when the ice sheets came down roughly to New York and London, natural benchmarks for latitude.

But where were people? Of course, there were quite a lot of people around 10, 12,000 years ago. People have been around 100—well, it depends how you count people, but 100,000, 200,000, depending on your definition of Homo Sapiens, or depending on your definition of sapiens, I suppose. But 100/200,000 years, humans have been around, we haven’t seen five degrees centigrade for 30 million years. At that time, the Eocene period, the world was covered in swampy forests. Very little ice, anyway. Five degrees centigrade below, we have seen, much more frequently.

And, of course, both of these things, five degrees up or five degrees down, transform where people can be. They rewrite the rivers. They rewrite the coastlines. Most of where we are, as humans, is shaped by rivers and coastlines. Southern Europe would probably look like the Sahara Desert. People would have to move. People would move on an enormous scale, just as they moved when it was five degrees centigrade lower. People haven’t seen five degrees centigrade higher, nowhere near. Three degrees centigrade 2 or 3 million years ago.

Again, way, way before humans. So we don’t really know how we would react to that, other than to be able to say where we could live and how we could live would be radically different. The snows would go off the Himalayas, the big rivers of the world would get rewritten—I mean, the big rivers of the world, in terms of the populations that they present. The big majority of them, not all of them, of course, but the big majority of them arise in a few hundred square kilometers of the Himalayas. Now, if you just go clockwise around from the Yellow River to the Yangtze to the Ganges and the Brahmaputra and the Jumna and the Indus. You’re talking about rivers that are the main sources of water for countries with a couple of billion people, with a billion or so or more directly affected by those rivers. You would just rewrite where people would be. Populations would move. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would move, and we would have extended world conflict.

This is not Nick Stern, the economist, describing this. This is simply Nick Stern relaying to you what the science tells us in a very direct way. But I’m expressing it in a way that allows us to start thinking about this as an insurance story or a risk management story in what we’re ready to pay to reduce the odds. If we held these concentrations of greenhouse gases below 500 parts per million, which we could with strong action, and I’ll describe what it is and what it would cost, if we held those concentrations below 500 parts per million, that 50/50 probability being above five degrees centigrade would come down to something like 3 percent. And that’s a huge insurance gain, a huge rich risk reduction, if we did manage to hold it below 500 parts per million.

We can’t hold it below 450. We will be at 450 in about six years. I mean, we’re adding two and a half a year, and six times two and a half is 15. Add that to 435. You know, in six years, we’re at 450. But we can hold below 500. And we can also be thinking about how we bring it on down from there. It takes a while to do that, and even 500 is a very dangerous place to be. Far, far less dangerous than 750, obviously. But we could work out how to bring it on down from there.

What would it cost us? Very roughly speaking—I could have told the story in three, four, five, six degrees centigrade, but just to be specific and to cut down the time, I told it in terms of five. But it’s the whole distribution that counts, not just one particular temperature like five degrees centigrade. What would it cost us? Well, relative to business as usual, we would probably have to take out about 65 gigatons of CO2 equivalent. What do we have to do? We have to get down from the over 50 gigatons that we emit each year at the moment. We have to get down to about 20 gigatons by 2050. That’s, roughly speaking, the path associated with holding below 500. In 1990, we were at 40 gigatons. So getting down to 20 gigatons in 2050 is cutting by 50 percent, relative to 1990.

So globally, the kind of path I described of holding below 500 involves getting down to about 20 gigatons as a flow. 500 is the stock. Getting down to about 20 gigatons is a flow by 2050. And that involves —depends on how you define business as usual, but taking out around 65 gigatons. And now you have to do another piece of arithmetic. It’s only multiplication. It’s not hard. 65 gigatons. We could probably do that at an average, and an average costs about $30 a ton. So $30 a ton times 65 gigatons. Well, you’ve obviously got 195 in there or 1.95 or 19500, however you do the numbers, and, of course, you’ve got to get your decimal points in the right place when you do this sort of thing. You’ve got to remember that giga is billion. Scientists like giga. Economists like billion. But giga, billion, same thing. So it’s actually, when you multiply 65 gigatons or 65 billion tons by $30 a ton, it’s 1.95 trillion, 2 trillion dollars, close enough.

What will world income be in 2050? It’s a bit over 50 trillion now. If we’re sensible and follow good policies in climate and elsewhere, it could easily double. I mean, not if we don’t, but it could easily double. That makes the arithmetic and the percentages easy. We’re a bit over 50, so a bit over $100 trillion in 2050. So two in 100 or so is around 2 percent. So you can build this up through boring old economic models and so on. But it’s very important to get a feel for why these numbers are what they are.

So for around 2 percent of GDP—I picked that for the year 2050, but it might look something like that for a while, for the next few decades—you buy this enormous reduction in risk. You make the difference between probably destroying the planet, as far as it is a place for life in any sense for humans, as we know it—that’s if you do nothing—but if you act sensibly and pay this very modest insurance premium, you can reduce the risks to levels which are probably manageable.

So that’s basically the story. What does it look like if you try to do this? Well, in the first place, a properly constructed green recovery would help us to get out of a recession. That’s the very, very short run. For the next two or three decades, we will create a technological revolution similar to, probably bigger than, the railways, electricity, the motor car, or IT. We will create a, those of you who like your economic history, we will create a Schumpetarian technology innovation investment-driven story of growth for the next two or three decades. When we get to low carbon growth, we will have something—because it’s the next three, four or five decades that’s the transition to that story—but when we get there, we will have a form of growth which is cleaner, more energy secure, quieter and more biodiverse.

And if we run the clock forward just a bit more, we will have reduced the risk of the transformation of the planet, which would occur as I just described it. This is a no-brainer. I mean, you’ve got the short run returns, you’ve got the driver of the technological story for the next two or three decades, you create a form of low carbon growth that’s much more attractive, and you drastically reduce the risks of major transformation of the planet. It’s just good sense, basic economics.

The wise investors and the wise business people are already out there seeing where this is going. And it’s even getting detailed. I mean, in Korea’s green recovery, they say, well, if the U.S. is going to build a smart grid, smart grids need smarter plants, they’re going to be made here in Korea. And people are already running through this story, seeing the opportunities.

But what we can’t do is pretend that there are no investment costs in this transition. There are investment costs in this transition. They’re serious. But they’re manageable. And they will happen, provided that the governments of the world set the right kind of framework for this to happen. And it means economic policy. It means a price for carbon, through attacks or a trading scheme or a bit of each. It means regulations. It means regulations on emissions. It means doing what we’ve just done in the U.K., announcing that there won’t be any more coal-fired power stations without carbon capture and storage. These are the kinds of policies it needs. It needs public, private partnerships in helping develop new technologies. It needs strong and clear policies to get there.

But basically, here we are. We know the kind of scale that we have to act on. We know the kinds of areas where we have to act, energy efficiency, low-carbon technology, and stopping deforestation. We know the economic instruments that we have to use. “Know,” in this sense, means have a good idea of. But we know enough to set off down the road. And we’re going to discover and learn like mad along the way. So we know the scale, we know the areas where we have to act, we know the kind of economic instruments. It’s now a matter of political will. And it’s this year that is absolutely crucial for putting that political will together.

I’ve already described, actually, one way or another, many aspects of the global deal. But let me now just pull out the global deal, from what I’ve said.

The global deal, if it’s going to be agreed and sustained, will have to be effective on the scale that’s necessary. I’ve already described that.

It will have to be efficient. That will be crucial because there will be serious costs of investing in the transition. It’s crucial to keep those costs as low as possible. If people think we’re wasting money pursuing those policies, then those policies will become politically fragile.

And it’s got to be equitable. Because otherwise, the different countries around the world, the different groups in the population will not support it or would not stay supporting it.

It has to be led by the rich countries. The rich countries, in terms of early action and I think it has to be led by the poor countries in terms of design. Because it’s the poorer countries of the world who are affected earliest and hardest, although we’re all affected, in the story I just described, in a very profound way.

But it’s the rich countries who have to take the lead in action. Why? Because they’re responsible, the 1 billion, out of the 6.7 billion, who live in rich countries, are responsible through their economic history for something like 60 to 65 percent of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now. They’re largely responsible, through the pursuit of high carbon growth; but this is a very difficult starting point.

We really wouldn’t have wanted to start from here. But we are where we are. And it’s the rich countries who are largely responsible through that pursuit of high carbon growth in the past. Of course, they’re better off, and they have the better developed technologies. So I think the responsibility for early and strong action clearly lie there.

Where do we have to go to in terms of what each country should look like now? Well, I’ve already said we’ve got to get down to 20 gigatons, and I’ve explained why. In 2050, there will be 9 billion of us, roughly speaking, plus or minus a few hundred million. There will be 9 billion. So if we’re emitting, as a world, 20 gigatons, and there are 9 billion of us, remembering again that giga and billion are the same thing, 20 divided by 9, you can all do that, even on a Monday morning, is just over 2. So we’ve got to be down to 2 tons per capita as well, roughly speaking.

Where are we now? Well, Europe, Japan is 10, 12 tons per capita. So to get from 10 to 12 to 2, divide by 5, cut by 80 percent. There’s nothing mysterious in the idea that rich countries should be cutting by 80 percent. 1990 to 2050, it just follows from the arithmetic.

Now, the United States is over 20 per capita. And Barack Obama said we’ll cut by 80 percent, 1990 to 2050. He really meant 90 percent. Because, you know, to get from over 20 down to 2, you’ve got to divide by 10, right? But never mind, we’re a very tolerant lot in Europe. The basic thing is if you set out strongly down the right road, a lot of the arithmetic, a lot of the technology is going to sort itself out later on.

We shouldn’t get overly hung up about exactly 80 or 90 percent. It does matter to have a strong view of where we’re going. And it does matter to set off down that path in a strong way. I mean, that’s what’s crucial. So when we get to Copenhagen, the 2050 will be the anchor for the arithmetic. There’s going to be some very hard bargaining, and there should be, over 2020. Because 2020 is surely an indication of whether we’re serious about getting to where we want to go in 2050. And that’s going to be where, I think, hard stuff is going to come. And it’s already coming in Copenhagen. The Waxman-Markey Bill talks about 7 percent reductions by 2020, relative to 1990 for the U.S. That’s a tough ask, actually, for the U.S., because they’re already 16, 17 percent above 1990. So to get back to 7 percent, below 1990, by 2020, as in Waxman-Markey, means taking off about a quarter in a decade.

Now, this is where the politics of this is going to get tough. Because there are two ways of looking at 2020. I’m sure there are many ways of looking at 2020, but here are two. 2020 is the midpoint between 1990 and 2050. They’re arithmetically unexceptionable. And 2020 is 10 years after 2010. Again, we can’t quarrel with the arithmetic. But the perspective is fundamentally different. Because in countries like the U.S. and Canada, and I was in Canada a couple of days ago talking to environmentalists and others, and there it’s a good deal higher in the U.S. relative to 1990. So to get, say, the U.S. as in Waxman-Markey, I take out of 25 percent in the next ten years is going to be tough.

But then, you know, sitting in India or China or Indonesia or Brazil or South Africa, you’re saying, “I see, you’re going to cut by 80 percent , 1990 to 2050. And at the halfway stage, 80 percent you’re going to take out in six decades. And after three decades, you’ve taken out 7 percent?” How serious does that sound?

So you can see why these two different perspectives on 2020 matter. And I think as a world, we have to recognize we’ve only been serious about this for two or three years. And we are getting serious about this. And that’s what makes me more optimistic about getting a global deal. So that’s going to be hard bargaining and very difficult. But I hope we can get there. It’s going to need a lot of mutual understanding.

But here it is. I more or less described the global deal. It’s 50 percent reductions overall, 1990 to 2050. If people keep going on about percentages, just bring them back to the 20 gigatons in 2050, because that’s what really counts, and the path to get there. 50 percent reductions overall, 80 percent reductions for rich countries.

None of this is going to work unless the developing countries are absolutely at center stage. 8 billion out of the 9 billion people in 2050 are going to be in currently developing countries. If the rich world was emitting precisely zero in 2050, then the average for the developing world would have to be not 2, but 2 1/2 tons per capita. This cannot work unless the big majority of people in the world are involved.

So that’s essentially a story which says that over the next ten years, the developing world will embark on climate change action plans. China described a climate change action plan two years ago, India one year ago, Brazil and South Africa at the end of last year. They’re starting to develop serious engagement in working out how to cut emissions. Now, where I see the global deal working out is the developing world explains to the rich world, these are the conditions. This is conditionality of the developing world on the rich world.

Take those 80 percent cuts you’re talking about. Be credible over the next decade. Develop the technologies. Share them with us. We’ll be developing technologies. We’ll share them with you also. The biggest producer of photovoltaics is in China. One of the biggest windmill producers for electricity is in India. They will be sharing technologies both ways. But develop the technologies, share them with us, help us with the finance, help us with adapting to climate change, because it’s really happening and it will happen, and we need to invest to protect ourselves against what’s going on and to pursue development in a more hostile climate.

You do all of these things, those are our conditions, and we will commit now to taking on targets, say from ten years time. In the meantime, here are our climate change action plans. Please help us with those, because the more you do, the more we can do. This is the way in which this discussion is starting to move, and I think it should move. But building on the kind of commitments, the rich countries are already indicating that they’ll take on.

Trading will be very important, both to bring the costs down, and to allow flows from rich countries to poor countries. The sharing of technologies, I’ve already described. We need explicit mechanisms for doing that. And I’m very happy to discuss those in questions. We have to stop deforestation. It’s responsible for 20 percent of emissions. There’s no way we can achieve these targets without stopping deforestation. China is reforesting, it’s not deforesting. India has declared for a target of 33 percent of the area forested. I think it’s about 22, 23 percent now, isn’t it? So if India makes it, that’s a big change too.

But, of course, it’s the tropical forests which really count—Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Congo, Central America, and so on. Those are the big things that really count there. We have to stop deforestation. That has to be a battle which is integrated into the whole development story. You can’t tackle deforestation in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brazil unless you help those governments create alternative opportunities, more productive agricultural opportunities outside agriculture, improving the ability to develop and enforce property rights and so on. It has to be integrated in the development story. So you’ve got to stop deforestation.

And we need to look, again, at the challenge of the Millennium Development Goals and beyond about financing for development. Because when we did those calculations—and I am partly responsible, it’s a shared responsibility, for not building climate change in as we should have, because I was Chief Economist at the World Bank when the UN had its Financing for Development Conference in Monterrey in 2002, and I led the writing of the Report for the Commission for Africa in 2005. And in each case, we understated the challenge of climate change for development. But we have to face up as a world to the extra costs of meeting development goals in the context of a changing climate.

So there you are. That’s the global deal. The targets, the trading, the technologies, the finance, the deforestation, and the adaptation story. Huge amounts of detail to work on. But it’s the framework that really counts.

Will we get there? I don’t know. But if we say it’s all too difficult, then nothing is ever going to work—and the U.S. is not going to give up its big hydrocarbon cars, and the British are too lazy to do anything, and the Chinese always cheat—you can tell, I can sit in a bar and tell the story. It’s very easy to do. But if you believe that, what is the consequence?

Well, you can’t wiggle out of the science. I mean, it’s basically clear and there. So if that’s what you really believe, you’re saying, well, we’ve got another 50, 100 years to go in terms of the kinds of life that we got used to leading. And we will, over that period so transform the planet, so that we’ll be living actually in very different and much more difficult ways. So if you’re negative and pessimistic about all this, it’s self-fulfilling. We won’t get there if you all say it’s all too difficult. And the consequences will be very severe. We must be honest about those consequences. So,buy a hat, some suntan lotion and write a letter of apology to your grandchildren. If you really want to push the negative part of the story. So the challenge is not, is it ever going to work? Yeah, it’s all too difficult. The challenge is what do we have to do to try to make it work?
Will we succeed? Of course there’s no guarantee that we’ll succeed. But we can see the way in which we have to try and the way in which we have to work together. And we can see the kinds of scale of activity. We can see the kind of technologies. We can see the kind of economic instruments. We know enough to embark down this road with purpose. If we don’t get a strong agreement in Copenhagen at the end of this year—not all the details, the details can be worked out later. But if we don’t get the basic framework, I would really worry about whether we’ll be able to put it together. Because it falls apart, people go away, and, you know, it might take a long time before we get back together again.

In the meantime, you’ve done a lot of damage in terms of increased concentrations. In the meantime, confidence in the markets that are going to sustain these kinds of investments would have been undermined. So not getting an agreement in Copenhagen, with the basic outlines, not all the details, would be very, very damaging. So this is a crucially important few months for the world really in terms of decision making.

And there’s no way that—you can’t negotiate with the basic scientific processes. You can’t negotiate with the concentrations in the atmosphere. They will be what they will be if we’re neglectful.

I’m much more optimistic than I was two or three years ago because you can see and hear the way in which the understanding and commitment on this issue has changed, whether it be in China or India or the United States or elsewhere. You can see the way that’s changed. The pace of change of technology has been quite remarkable. It’s impossible to give a talk like this to business people without going away with a pocket full of cards if somebody’s got some great idea about how to reduce emissions, how to pull the greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. If one tenth of these ideas work that are just sort of bubbling through, we can have a whole range of ways of acting, all of which will cost a bit, probably, but, you know, some will be more successful than others.

So in terms of the changing politics, in terms of changing technologies and investments, I’m much more optimistic than I was two or three years ago. I think we’re going to get there in Copenhagen. And the months that follow, I really don’t know. But we’ve got a chance there that we can blow now. And, you know, human beings are not bad at messing up opportunities. But there is an opportunity now to mess up. And one of the reasons I wrote the book was try to reduce the probability that we might. Thank you very much.

——-

Questions and Answers

QUESTION: Lord Stern, thank you so much for a great talk. Are we being maybe even too optimistic? You paint a pretty bleak scenario, if we don’t do this. Should we have contingency plans in place that would suggest that we need not $30 a ton, but maybe $75 by 2015? Because what we are now seeing with the positive feedback loops, positive in a scientific sense, particularly the change in the Arctic, much more emissions of methane from both the tundra, undersea, et cetera, all of these things, which you know, which would suggest that the window we have to get this done may even be shorter. And therefore, we should be, contingency-wise, at least prepared intellectually to pay a higher cost because the time to get it done is perhaps much shorter than we think it is?
NICHOLAS STERN: These positive feedbacks, things like the melting of the permafrost and releasing a lot of methane, the collapse of the Amazon, which could well happen around three degrees centigrade, which we might be at in 50, 60 years, the decreasing acidity, so the increasing acidity of the oceans which decreases the absorptive capacity, all of these things actually are usually omitted from the formal scientific models. Complication, grounds, difficulty in quantification, but they’re very real possibilities. So it actually does look more worrying than when we were writing two and a half years ago, although all of the basic line of argument is the same.

I think that the description that I gave of cutting by 50 percent as a world, 1990 to 2050, is actually quite unambitious, relative to science. And indeed, many scientists will tell you very loudly what you’re doing, you’re telling me to cut by 50 percent? It should be 80 percent globally by 2050. Although, of course, it is quite ambitious in the point of view of the economics. And many people would draw the conclusion that you drew, that we should be acting faster and more strongly. And therefore, you would be thinking of higher, high costs. Because the faster you do it, the more it costs. So I think that relative to the magnitude of the real scientific problem, I’ve erred on the side of caution.

I’ve erred on the side of caution on the economics. I’ve erred on the side of recklessness, if you like, on the science. So if I were to be pushed to shift in a direction from the one I just articulated, I would certainly go in the direction that you described, that we should be stronger than I am describing, not weaker. And you can make that case, and perhaps you should. I should emphasize, I am talking about average costs. A lot of the costs of what we do actually are negative. I mean, if we’re sensible about a lot of the energy efficiency options we have, we save money. But it won’t all be negative costs. And on the margin, it will be, of course, a good deal higher.

–

QUESTION: One problem we face seems to be that we are locked in by the present technology that exists in the U.S., in China, in Europe. Every week, on average, a new coal-fired power plant is being opened in China, with the effect of about 1,000 megawatts. And it’s calculated for over 25 years. And today, as we speak, China is (inaudible) based on clean coal. If they continue to run these, according to their business plan, we will be far off the mark that you have indicated that we need to reach.

So those, the owners, the countries and the private owners of these plants seem, to me, to be unlikely to close down these plants without compensation or to retrofit them. And just imagine what it would cost to retrofit the power of coal fire power plants of this world with carbon capture and storage. It would also increase the energy price by today’s standard by, let’s say, 40 percent . This is, of course, site specific. So what we seem to need is a new set of economic incentives, which means going steps further from the Kyoto mechanisms, which provided some incentives which have worked in some countries, and to provide a larger global scheme that gives the developing countries where the emissions will increase the most, like China, positive incentives for change. And I haven’t seen, so far during the run-up to the Copenhagen, any proposal in pretty language which provides that scene and which links a positive cash flow with achieved reduction targets. I would like to hear your comment on what needs to be done in that direction.

NICHOLAS STERN: I think the ballpark you’re talking about, 40, 50 percent increases in prices of electricity around the world for a few decades, is probably roughly right. If you take a rich country, something like 4 percent of GDP would be primary energy. If you increase that cost by 50 percent , you get back to the 2 percent of national income I’m talking about. So if we’re talking about increasing the price of electricity 50 percent in many places for a while, that is a price that we should be quite ready to pay. And we probably would have to.

My acquaintance with India is much deeper than China. I’ve been living in India, on and off, for different parts of the last 35 years. But I’ve been living in China, again, on and off for 20 years. And the change in China in the last two or three years is quite remarkable in terms of their understanding of the issues. And the 11th five-year plan which finishes at the end of next year, had a a 20 percent reduction target of energy to output, which they probably will reach—of course, if output goes up by 40, 45 percent , and the energy use goes up by 20 some percent, which is what’s happened—but I think the 12th five-year plan, which starts in the end of next year, beginning of the year after—and they’re already working on it and preparing an energy strategy, which would actually precede the 12th five-year plan—I think is likely to have emissions targets rather than energy targets. This is all discussions over the last few months and weeks. But I think that’s where it’s going.

Will countries like China, in terms of growth ambitions, energy ambitions, will they achieve the kinds of transformations we’re talking about without substantial sharing of technology and substantial finance? The answer is no. I described briefly some importance of sharing technologies. But let’s look at the kind of schemes of the trading finance for RT that could do it. Some of you will know about the Clean Development Mechanism, which is a project by project trading arrangement. It’s designed under the Kyoto Protocol, but mostly driven by the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, whereby a firm that has to meet a target under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, can buy a reduction in a developing country. But it’s organized on a project basis. And the firm itself in the developing country, which is selling it to the firm in the rich country, has to show and has to be approved by various committees at the country level in Bonn and so on has to show that it will be cutting its emissions relative to what it might have done.

“What it might have done” is counterfactual. You want to know what I might have done? Well, here is what I might have done. You know, it’s quite difficult to work with this kind of apparatus. And it’s very, very heavy. What we’re going to need for a while, I think for ten or 15 years, possibly more, and we do have to negotiate this at Copenhagen, is a successor to the Clean Development Mechanism, which is one-sided trading, in the sense that you get rewarded if you go down. But you don’t get penalized if you go up. Which can work on a wholesale way.

So the Province of China decides under its program that it’s going to have no further investment in coal-fired without carbon capture and storage. Then we can identify quite clearly the kind of reductions that would involve much more easily than the project by project scheme. And what we should be envisaging is wholesale funds, which arise from the ambitious kind of caps we’ve got in Europe and I trust we will have in the U.S., so that firms combined that fund, and that fund could take a slice of this Province of China that’s embarking on this program.

So I think if we replace the Clean Development Mechanism with something that’s much more suitable for wholesale, that’s programatic, as opposed to project-based, then we could envisage financial flows. And we’ve been modeling them a bit. And they probably would be of the order of somewhere between 100 and 200 billion a year by the 20s under these kind of trading arrangements. That’s the kind of financial structure, trading structure that we would need for a while to support these kinds of investments. And we’ve got to be quantitative and open and direct about what’s involved. There’s another story, of course, in proving that these carbon capture stories technologies work on a commercial scale. And that’s something we have to embark on again, as a world where different countries do different things. The Australians are doing a few, there are a few in the U.K., I’m sure. Canada is doing a few. I’m sure there will be more than a few in the U.S. So at the same time, as we work on the finance, we have to work on the sharing of the technology as well. But that’s exactly the kind of detail we have to work on. And we have to be frank about the scale of what’s involved.

–

QUESTION: Thank you again, Lord Stern, for that magisterial performance, which doesn’t surprise any of us. But since I suspect you’re largely preaching to the converted here, I wonder if I might ask you to rebut two of the more persuasive arguments being made by those who disagree with you and with the global warming, simply so we can get those arguments knocked down. And I hear them all the time.

The first is from sort of the view of the Bjørn Lomborg School of the skeptical environmentalist, who essentially sidesteps the case you’re making by saying that even if what you’re saying is true, with the expenditure required to deal with it now is excessive in relation to how much more good you can do to the world by spending a fraction of that money dealing with other things like Malaria and AIDS and development to stop poverty, and drinking water and things like that, and that this is, therefore, a misplaced sense of priority.

And a second argument is broadly what one might call the American conservative argument that says that expecting the world to organize itself today to impose costs upon itself now for possible dangers 100 years down the road is essentially politically irresponsible, that the technologies will find solutions before things ever get that bad. And in the meantime, we should leave well enough alone and let us take care of today’s people, who, of course, happen to be today’s voters, as well. You are going to be imposing short-term costs on people who are not going to necessarily see visible benefits for the costs and pain you’re inflicting upon them. I think those two arguments do require some sort of response from someone like yourself. And I’d love to hear it.

NICHOLAS STERN: I think the response is actually implicit in what I already said. But the challenge you’ve drawn out is absolutely right because this is what we do here. I know Bjørn Lomborg reasonably well. And he’s a rather engaging fellow. But I think he’s more of a stand-up comic than a serious contributor to this. And he’s not an economist or a scientist.

But that’s by the by. Let’s take the argument. What’s the argument? That there are better ways of investing. There’s a whole collection of mistakes in the argument. The first one, and in many ways, the most important, is to treat these as separate projects. The two defining challenges of our century are overcoming world poverty and managing climate change. I’ve spent the big majority of my professional life on the former. One of the reasons I feel so strongly about climate change is that is for the reasons I described, it would undermine the progress that we’ve made and reverse it. We succeed or fail on these two defining challenges together.

As I described it, most of the effects of climate change and their damaging form on human lives come in water in some shape or form. They’re inextricably interlinked. It is just a simple failure in logic to treat the problems of development and water management separately from those of climate change. So when you set it up as sort of separate investment projects with the internal rate of return, you’re just making a basic analytical mistake in relation to the logical structure of the problem. So the argument is just deeply flawed and deliberately misleading.

He also, very deliberately, understates the magnitude of the problem. And he takes lower estimates. He takes means. He doesn’t look at distributions. And he doesn’t look beyond the end of this century. So within that overall structural logical mistake, there are all kinds of subdiffusions of cooking the books along the way. It’s a kind I just described. Deliberately taking lower estimates, deliberately taking means and not looking at distributions, when this is a risk management problem, and deliberately curtailing the time period. I could go on. I mean, there’s mistake after mistake in there, including the discussions of discounting, in the context of a future that depends on what you do now in a very big way. Most of economics, when it discusses discounting, looks at some assumed growth path and thinks a little (inaudible) associated with investment projects around that path, which, again, is an analytical mistake of huge importance in this kind of context, when what the future looks like, including whether or not we’re better off, depends profoundly on what we do now.

So I could go on. But as I say, Bjørn tells a very good case, and he’s a very engaging guy, actually. You ought to listen to him, it’s worth going to, but just remember, he’s wrong.

The conservative story, as you portrayed it, is partly answered by what I’ve just said. Because implicit in the plausibility of that story is the notion that these effects down the track are not that big. So you’re saying, why should we give up what seems to be a lot now in return for something which, you know, is a bit uncertain and accrues to people who are going to be much richer, much richer than us? And more to the point they don’t have a vote.

Well, the answer to that is that you don’t have to give up that much now. And some of it looks very exciting and positive. I don’t want to say you don’t have to give up anything now. That would be wrong and misleading. You do have to invest now. But it has tremendous returns beyond simply the climate change story, which I described. So I think it’s very important to come back first with two things.

One is, that do you realize the magnitude of the changes that we’re potentially talking about here?

And secondly, point to the very positive parts of the story as well. But this is something which requires enormous leadership. When we gathered together as a world in 1944 at Bretton Woods, we had seen 30 years of global warfare and great depression. We could see, in a very direct way, what goes wrong if we don’t think ahead and we don’t collaborate. The evidence was, you know, in blood in very recent history.

This one, we’re having to say, look, this is actually much bigger, in many ways, than these World Wars and the Great Depression. But in 50 years, 100 years down the track, some things much earlier, but in terms of its big magnitude, this is a great test of rationality for human beings. It’s not simply that they can get scalded and say, getting scalded is not a good idea, I’ll avoid getting scalded. That’s the evolutionary approach to learning. This is a big challenge for us, in terms of rational human beings. We’ve got to anticipate this one. It doesn’t make it any less real. But it means it’s less real in terms of direct experience.

So that’s the great challenge for political leadership. That’s why communication is so important. That’s journalism communication is so important. I had a long discussion with Rahul Ghandi about how this can become a current political issue in India. In India, of all places, people understand the consequences of water, storms, floods, droughts. If ever there was a place in the world, no necessity to explain that to people, that they know. But it’s linking, linking that to action in India now, linking action in India now to what other people might do as a world. That’s the challenge of communication. I think it’s enormously important that we take that on.

JOANNE MYERS: I thank you really very much for bringing all of these issues to us today. They’re very important. And I want to thank you for making such a strong case. Thank you.

The Wall Isn’t Falling in Iran!

Fareed Zakaria - NEWSWEEK
Historical parallels don’t work in Iran.

From the Newsweek Magazine  issue dated Jul 13, 2009.

Whenever we see the kinds of images that have been coming out of Iran over the past two weeks, we tend to think back to 1989 and Eastern Europe. That time, when people took to the streets and challenged their governments, those seemingly stable regimes proved to be hollow and quickly collapsed. What emerged was liberal democracy. Could Iran yet undergo its own velvet revolution?

It’s possible but unlikely. While the regime’s legitimacy has cracked-a fatal wound in the long run-for now it will probably be able to use its guns and money to consolidate power. And it has plenty of both. Remember, the price of oil was less than $20 a barrel back in 1989. It is currently $69. More important, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has pointed out, 1989 was highly unusual. As a historical precedent, it has not proved a useful guide to other antidictatorial movements.

The three most powerful forces in the modern world are democracy, religion, and national-ism. In 1989 in Eastern Europe, all three were arrayed against the ruling regimes. Citizens hated their governments because they deprived people of liberty and political participation. Believers despised communist leaders because they were atheistic, banning religion in countries where faith was deeply cherished. And people rejected their regimes because they were seen as having been imposed from the outside by a much–disliked imperial power, the Soviet Union.

The situation in Iran is more complex. Democracy clearly works against this repressive regime. The forces of religion, however, are not so easily aligned against it. Many, possibly most, Iranians appear to be fed up with theocracy. But that does not mean they are fed up with religion. It does appear that the more openly devout Iranians-the poor, the rural-voted for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

There is one way religion could be used against Iran’s leaders, but it would involve an unlikely scenario: were Iraq-based Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to issue a fatwa condemning Tehran in any way, it would be a seismic event, probably resulting in the regime’s collapse. Remember, Sistani is Iranian, probably more revered in the entire Shia world than any other ayatollah, and he is opposed to the basic doctrine of velayat-e faqih that created the Islamic Republic of Iran. His own view is that clerics should not be involved in politics, which is why he has steered clear of any such role in Iraq. But he is unlikely to publicly criticize the Iranian regime. (He did, however, refuse to see Ahmadinejad when the latter visited Iraq in March 2008.)

Nationalism is the most complex of these three forces. Over most of its history, the Iranian regime has exploited nationalist sentiment. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power by battling the shah, who was widely seen as an American puppet. Soon after the revolution, Iraq attacked Iran, and the mullahs wrapped themselves in the flag again. The United States supported Iraq in that war, ignoring Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iranians-something Iranians have never forgotten. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration’s veiled threats to attack Iran allowed the mullahs to drum up support. (Every Iranian dissident, from Akbar Ganji to Shirin Ebadi, has noted that talk of airstrikes on Iran strengthened the regime.) And it is worth remembering that the United States still funds guerrilla outfits and opposition groups that are trying to topple the Islamic Republic. Most of these are tiny groups with no chance of success, funded largely to appease right-wing congressmen.

But the Tehran government is able to portray this as an ongoing anti–Iranian campaign.

In this context, President Obama is quite right to tread cautiously, extend his moral support to Iranian protesters, but not get politically involved. The United States has always underestimated the raw power of nationalism across the world, always assuming that people will not be taken in by cheap and transparent appeals against foreign domination. But look at what is happening in Iraq right now, where Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki boasts that America’s troop withdrawals are a “a heroic repulsion of the foreign occupiers.” Of course Maliki would not be in office but for those occupying forces, who protect his government to this day. But he is a canny politician and knows what will appeal to the Iraqi people.

Ahmadinejad is also a politician with considerable mass appeal. And he is already accusing the United States and Britain of interference. Our strategy should be to make sure that these accusations seem as loony and baseless as possible. Were President Obama to be seen as grandstanding and taking ownership of the protest movement, he would be -helping Ahmadinejad’s strategy, not America’s.
————————————————————————–
Fareed Zakaria was named editor of Newsweek International in October 2000, overseeing all Newsweek editions abroad. The magazine reaches an audience of 24 million worldwide.

from  Hazel.Foster at fco.gov.uk
In the wake of recent significant events involving North Korea, Peter Hughes, the UK’s Ambassador to Pyongyang, will be giving a media briefing on DPRK and the international reaction on 3 July in London.
Peter Hughes will be speaking via video-link live from Pyongyang. The FCO will be streaming questions (from media attending the event in London) and his answers through our website www.fco.gov.uk

The briefing will begin at 1015 UK time, 0515 NY time. If you don’t want to get up that early, it will be archived on the FCO website once it happens, so you should be able to view it later.

Hazel Foster (Miss)
Third Secretary Press
United Kingdom Mission to the United Nations
One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza
885 Second Avenue (48th Street & 2nd Avenue, 28th Floor)
New York, NY 10017
Tel:  00 1 212 745 9288
Fax:  00 1 212 745 9316
FTN:  8451 2288

UKMis Web:  ukun.fco.gov.uk
Visit our blogs at http://blogs.fco.gov.uk

Yesterday morning George Soros spoke at a Wall Street Journal “Viewpoints” Breakfast. In conversation with Alan Murray, he discussed his outlook for the economy and his view of the current debate over regulation and other topics. Click the link below to watch the 40-minute video.

 http://online.wsj.com/video/viewpoints-s…

–

Next Wednesday, July 8th at 3pm (Eastern), George will be a guest on FireDogLake’s book salon; he will be taking questions from readers over the web. Go to http://firedoglake.com to join the discussion.

 http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=3…

ARAB WORLD BLOGGERS MORE WARY OF THEIR LEADERS THAN OF ISRAEL
30 June 2009

“Democracy in the Arab World”

BY ODEN YARON

Ordinarily, we in Israel examine the Arab world from the political and security point of view. From that perspective it often looks monolithic and in many cases quite threatening. A study published this month by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University tried to map the blogosphere in the Arab world and reveals once again the extent to which our perceptions are one-dimensional.

Support for terror, for example, is almost entirely absent from the texts published in blogs originating in the Arab world. Researchers John Kelly, Robert Faris and John Palfrey found that only 1 percent of the more than 4,000 blogs examined supported terror activity, whereas 19 percent openly opposed terror. It would seem that these findings, along with others throughout the study, could indicate that American policymakers’ fear concerning the use of the Internet to spread hate and support for terror are a bit exaggerated.

As support, the authors also refer to the trend studies at the Pew Research Center that show a consistent decline in support for suicide attacks in places like Lebanon - from a support rate of 74 percent in 2002 down to 32 percent in 2008.

“This is not to say,” write the authors, “that anti-Western ideas are absent, or that groups like Hamas and Hezbollah do not have significant support, but that these ideas are countered by others, and support of Al Qaeda and civilian attacks is very rare…”

The authors also say that they “do not argue that extremist Web sites do not exist; certainly they do and our research does not address their impact. However, academic studies and media reports that focus exclusively on terrorist use of the Web can leave the impression that this is a dominant form of discourse in the Arabic language Internet, and could lead to ill-informed policy responses, which could intentionally limit the diverse, open and often civically-minded political, cultural, and religious discussions that take place in blogs and other Internet spaces.”

Mapping the Arabic blogoverse

The researchers had the help of Arabic-speakers to read and identify the characteristics of 4,000 blogs. Among other things, the researchers found that the vast majority of the bloggers are young men - about 75 percent of them under the age of 35, and of this group 45 percent are between 25 and 35 years old. According to the study, only 9 percent of the bloggers in the Arab world are older than 35. The researchers also found that more than 60 percent of the bloggers are men and only 34 percent are women (a number were unidentified). However, in Saudi Arabia, for example, it emerged that the proportion of women was especially high: about 46 percent.

The study also made use of a special technology to map the Arab blogosphere in a way similar to a previous study of the Iranian blogosphere. To this end, the researchers mapped 35,000 blogs in 18 countries and examined their links to each other and other blogs. Thus, by examining the internal connections among the sites, they created clusters.

One of the patterns that stood out in the study is the clustering into countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lebanon. At the same time, the researchers also identified groups of blogs written in English and French - mostly in North Africa but also in Syria - which the researchers have called a bridge to the wider world.

Within the countries there was also a sorting into groups. In Egypt, for example, where they found the largest number of bloggers, there are clusters of bloggers identified with or close to the Muslim Brotherhood as well as a large cluster of secular reformists who have little love for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak

A smaller Israeli blip

Researchers were interested to discover that most of the writers are more interested in domestic political issues than in regional wars. Criticism of local leaders is the most common political topic the researchers encountered, and the next most common is not hatred for the United States or Israel but rather posts critical of terror.

In Lebanon, the researchers found criticism of local political leaders in more than 50 percent of the blogs but also a broad measure of support. In Syria, by comparison, the chances that a blogger would express support for the regime are especially low.

The bottom line is that a vast majority of the bloggers write about themselves and their lives. But make no mistake: Criticism of Israel and the United States does exist and is reinforced by events in the news. The film on YouTube to which the most blogs linked was extremely critical of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. The second most popular was a video of the shoe thrown by an Iraqi journalist at former U.S. president George W. Bush.

The researchers said they were surprised to find the extent to which Web 2.0 sites have been integrated into the Arab bloggers’ everyday activity. Indeed, it emerged that links to sites like Wikipedia and YouTube are more common than links to the major news sources in their countries.

Despite their tone of optimism regarding the political variety and relative openness in the blogs, the researchers are in no hurry to declare that the Internet will bring about a democratic revolution in the Arab world. They noted two contradictory theories about the way the Internet can nurture public discourse in Arab countries.

On the one hand, they noted Israeli-American Harvard law school Prof. Yochai Benkler’s “view of the networked public sphere as a boon for individual autonomy and freedom, breaking elite strangleholds on democratic discourse and drawing diverse interests and talents into a common arena.”

On the other hand, they noted, University of Chicago law school Professor Cass Sunstein warns in his book “Republic.com 2.0″ that the possibility the Internet offers for uniting into groups of the like-minded does not contribute to the creation of a global village. Instead, it contributes to increasing fragmentation of society and the loss of the common denominator that, along with other things, is essential for the existence of a democracy, he wrote.

The researchers also remarked that, as in Egypt, Iran and Syria, bloggers have been arrested or blocked and they add that technology is not serving only pro-Western forces.

“The Internet does not just promise (or threaten) to change the balance of power among players on the field,” cyber researcher Clay Shirky has argued, “it changes the field and changes the players too.” However, from the perspective of the Berkman Center researchers, the most important thing to remember is that the field is not only black and white and that the Islamic extremists are just one aspect of it. At least in the blogosphere, they still sit on the margins.

See Related: IRAN

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND NEWS MEDIA ARE AFRAID TO CONFRONT ISLAM - SAN FRANCISCO SENTINEL OPINION

Pakistani Public Turns Against Taliban, But Still Negative on US.

 http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/a…

July 1, 2009
Full Report (PDF)
Questionnaire/Methodology (PDF)

Most Pakistanis now see the Pakistani Taliban as well as al Qaeda as a critical threat to the country–a major shift from 18 months ago–and support the government and army in their fight in the Swat Valley against the Pakistani Taliban. An overwhelming majority think that Taliban groups who seek to overthrow the Afghan government should not be allowed to have bases in Pakistan.

However, this does not bring with it a shift in attitudes toward the US. A large majority continue to have an unfavorable view of the US government. Almost two-thirds say they do not have confidence in Obama. An overwhelming majority opposes US drone attacks in Pakistan.

These are some of the results of a new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll conducted May 17-28, 2009. The nationwide random sample included 1000 Pakistani adults, selected using multi-stage probability sampling, who responded in face-to-face interviews. The margin of error is +/- 3.2 percent.

“A sea change has occurred in Pakistani public opinion. The tactics and undemocratic bent of militant groups–in tribal areas as well as Swat–have brought widespread revulsion and turned Pakistanis against them,” comments Clay Ramsay, research director. However, he adds: “It’s crucial to understand that the US is resented just as much as before, despite the US having a new president.”

There has been a huge increase in those who think the “activities of Islamist militants and local Taliban” are a critical threat to Pakistan–a 47 point rise to 81 percent, up from 34 percent in late 2007. If the Pakistani Taliban were to gain control of the country, 75 percent say this would be bad (very bad, 67%)–though only 33 percent think this outcome is likely.

Seventy percent say their sympathies are more with the government than with the Pakistani Taliban in the struggle over Swat. Large majorities express confidence in the government (69%) and the military (72%) to handle the situation. Retrospectively, the public leans (by 45% to 40%) toward thinking the government was right to try to make an agreement in which the Pakistani Taliban would shut down its camps and turn in its heavy weapons in return for a shari’a court system in Swat. But now 67 percent think the Pakistani Taliban violated the agreement when it sent its forces into more areas, and 63 percent think the people of Swat disapprove of the agreement.

On the Afghan Taliban, an overwhelming 87 percent think that groups fighting to overthrow the Afghan government should not be allowed to have bases in Pakistan. Most (77%) do not believe the Afghan Taliban has bases in Pakistan. However, if Pakistan’s government were to identify such bases in the country, three in four (78%) think it should close the bases even if it requires using military force.

Public attitudes toward al Qaeda training camps follow the same pattern. Those saying the “activities of al Qaeda” are a critical threat to Pakistan are up 41 points to 82 percent. Almost all (88%) think al Qaeda should not be allowed to operate training camps in Pakistan. Though 76 percent do not believe there are such camps, if the Pakistani government were to identify them, 74 percent say the government should close them, with force if necessary.

This striking new public willingness to see the government directly oppose Taliban groups and al Qaeda owes little or nothing to an “Obama effect.” A 62 percent majority expresses low confidence in President Obama to do the right thing in world affairs (none at all, 41%). Only one in three (32%) think his policies will be better for Pakistan; 62 percent think they will be about the same (26%) or worse (36%).

Views of the US remain overwhelmingly negative. Sixty-nine percent have an unfavorable view of the current US government (58% very unfavorable)–essentially the same as in 2008. Eighty-eight percent think it is a US goal to weaken and divide the Islamic world (78% definitely a goal). The US Predator drone attacks aimed at militant camps within the Pakistani border are rejected by 82 percent as unjustified. On the war in Afghanistan, 72 percent disapprove of the NATO mission and 79 percent want it ended now; 86 percent think most Afghans want the mission ended as well.

Asked about the nation’s leaders, a large majority–68 percent–views President Zardari unfavorably (very, 50%), but–unlike the recent past–there are multiple national leaders whom most do view favorably. Prime Minister Gilani is seems untarred by negative views of Zardari and gets favorable ratings from 80 percent of Pakistanis. The restored Chief Justice Chaudry is very popular (82%), and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif is extremely popular (87%). The leader most associated with the Pakistani Taliban, Maulana Sufi Mohammad, is viewed positively by only 18 percent of Pakistanis.

  Permalink | Printer Friendly |  Email This Article
Posted in Reporting from Washington DC, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan

del.icio.us Digg Reddit Google Technorati Windows Live Yahoo! | what's this?

Discuss this article

Heart health at the tip of your finger
By Karin Kloosterman
July 01, 2009

 http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enDi…;

Whoopi Goldberg tried the EndoPAT heart test on her finger during a recent episode of The View and came out smiling. After 15 minutes, the Israeli developed device was able to give her heart a passing grade. At least for the next seven years.

Developed by Itamar Medical, an Israeli company traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, the EndoPAT has been popular not only with celebrities, but also gets a seal of approval from America’s doctors, and prestigious medical institutions like the Mayo Clinic.

Earning FDA status in 2003, the EndoPAT can measure the health of your heart using two small probes that hook up to each index finger. While there are other tests on the market like ultrasound tests to help clinicians assess if a patient has the early onset of heart disease, the EndoPAT looks further into the future — up to seven years, sensing whether or not your arteries are losing elasticity.

Like a blood pressure test on your finger

“The test I’m talking about - a 15 minute test - is a probe on the finger and basically it works the way you take blood pressure,” says Dr. Dov Reuven, the company’s CEO. “We do the same thing and measure the stress of the arteries in the fingertips.”

Used over 150,000 times in the US, the recent vote of confidence from the Mayo Clinic, which tested the EndoPAT on an independent study of healthy volunteers - part of the Framingham Heart Study — tells doctors that it’s a good addition to their toolkit for assessing heart disease.

“That’s the beauty of this. That’s why it is revolutionary,” Reuven tells ISRAEL21c. “The EnoPAT is the easiest detector of this disease. All other devices work within about one, two or three years. There is a test in the US that looks for carotid plaque. The point is once there is a buildup of plaque, it is too late in the cycle. A patient is not going to turn around that much. Ours can already see arteries that are less distensible.”

This means that people who may get a clean bill of health from doctors, can look deeper into their future, to know if they are at risk for heart attack seven years down the road. If you discover you are at risk, a regimen for improving health can be developed with a doctor. Changing one’s diet and exercise, or taking statins, may be a course of action.

Applications in understanding erectile problems

It also has become an interesting test for understanding erectile dysfunction, and can help a doctor decide whether or not to prescribe erection-enhancing drugs like Cialis, says Reuven.

The same device that tests for heart health can also tell urologists whether or not to prescribe medicine. “It could protect them from malpractice,” says Reuven.

Essentially, using this device doctors have a much better way now to control a patient’s health to determine if they are at risk of a heart attack. “The importance of the Mayo Clinic story is that today when you go to your physicians or cardiologist, they will ask you seven questions, or risk factors for heart disease, like cholesterol levels, if you smoke, or are overweight,” says Reuven.

Sometimes there are people who are considered completely low risk based on these basic questions, but nevertheless are at risk for heart disease. The study examined 240 people who are “specimens of health”, tacking them over time, and recording cardiac events, such as chest pains or heart attacks.

The efficacy of the test was confirmed by doctors at Mayo. The clinic writes: “Results of a Mayo Clinic study show that a simple, non-invasive finger sensor test is ‘highly predictive’ of a major cardiac event, such as a heart attack or stroke, for people who are considered at low or moderate risk, according to researchers.”

Mayo’s seal of approval

The device is now available at doctors’ clinics in the US, including the clinic of The View’shouse doctor Dr. Stephen Lamm.

Endorsing the product, Lamm says he uses it on every patient, translating to about 200 times a month.

On the show, Whoopi scored a 1.9, “and she was excited,” says Reuven. “The real truth is the arterial sclerosis process starts early on in life. This will become part of the screening and treatment process,” he adds, mentioning that China is taking a serious look at the device too. “They can’t afford heart bypasses and stents.”

The EndoPAT has applications in wellness and holistic medicine as a means to quantify if a treatment is working.

The company has a second device, a product that functions like a mini sleep lab used to detect the severity of sleep apnea. Called the WatchPAT it resembles a ski or diving watch. It removes the need for people to spend uncomfortable nights in a sleep lab.

Traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, the largest investor in Itamar Medical is Medtronic. The company employs about 160 people worldwide.