It’s Time to Rethink Kyoto Protocol.

Newsday - Long Island, N.Y.
Author: Oran R. Young.
Date: Aug 1, 2001
Start Page: A.31
Section: VIEWPOINTS
Text Word Count: 672

Abstract (Document Summary)

Needed as well is a much-improved steering system. Because emissions of greenhouse gases come from many sources, we need a sophisticated and credible system for tracking not only aggregate concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere but also trends in emissions from a variety of sources. Linked to this is the need for flexible procedures for adjusting the rules regarding climate change that do not require protracted ratification procedures. Here, too, there is much to learn from the experience of addressing the problem of ozone depletion.

Nonetheless, the effort to address the problem of climate change at the international level has run into a brick wall.

Upbeat stories coming out of Bonn recently cannot hide the impasse over the Kyoto Protocol.

The United States, the source of almost 25 percent of worldwide carbon emissions, flatly refuses to accept the Kyoto rules.

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.

 In 1953 Iran lost its one shot at real democracy thanks to the US CIA. Later on Iran lost one million people on the hands of  a US sanctioned Saddam Hussein attack - now the Iranian government blames their old enemies while beating their own people. They also blame British nationals - but these days the real blame - honestly - is on all of us - this because we allow funds to flow to the coffers of the Iranian government - then wonder what makes them tick?

How long will it still take to recognize not just the miserable US history in Iran, which finally was recognized as such by President Obama, but also the fact that behind the CIA and the decision makers in the US Department of State - and in the White House itself - was that forced dependency on oil - engineered by self serving oil interests that had and still have a strangle hold on US policy. That is what set up the CIA and the others to do exactly what they did.

The memory of Neda Agha-Soltan deserves better from us - it deserves a good GREEN LAW in the United States - the kind of law that will help us fight our addiction to oil and thus retire the batton wielding and gun shooting goons of Tehran.

————–

NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Green Revolution(s)

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: June 23, 2009

There has been a lot of worthless chatter about what President Barack Obama should say about Iran’s incipient “Green Revolution.” Sorry, but Iranian reformers don’t need our praise. They need the one thing we could do, without firing a shot, that would truly weaken the Iranian theocrats and force them to unshackle their people. What’s that? End our addiction to the oil that funds Iran’s Islamic dictatorship. Launching a real Green Revolution in America would be the best way to support the “Green Revolution” in Iran.

Oil is the magic potion that enables Iran’s turbaned shahs — “Shah Khamenei” and “Shah Ahmadinejad” — to snub their noses at the world and at many of their own people as well. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad behaves like someone who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. By coincidence, he’s been president of Iran during a period of record high oil prices. So, although he presides over an economy that makes nothing the world wants, he can lecture us about how the West is in decline and the Holocaust was a “myth.” Trust me, at $25 a barrel, he won’t be declaring that the Holocaust was a myth anymore.

The Obama team wants to pursue talks with Iran over its nuclear program, no matter who wins there. Fine. But the issue is not talk or no talk. The issue is leverage or no leverage. I love talking to people — especially in the Middle East — on one condition: that we have the leverage. As long as oil prices are high, Iran will have too much leverage and will be able to resist concessions on its nuclear program. With oil at $70 a barrel, our economic sanctions on Iran are an annoyance; at $25, they really hurt.

“People do not change when you tell them they should; they change when they tell themselves they must,” observed Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy specialist. And nothing would tell Iran’s leaders that they must change more than collapsing oil prices.

* * * * *

Mr. Obama has already started some excellent energy-saving initiatives. But we need more. Imposing an immediate “Freedom Tax” of $1 a gallon on gasoline — with rebates to the poor and elderly — would be a triple positive: It would stimulate more investment in renewable energy now; it would stimulate more consumer demand for the energy-efficient vehicles that the reborn General Motors and Chrysler are supposed to make; and, it would reduce our oil imports in a way that would surely affect the global price and weaken every petro-dictator.

That is how — as Bill Maher likes to say — we make the bad guys “fight all of us.”

Sure, it would take time to influence the regime, but, unlike words alone, it will have an impact. I believe in “The First Law of Petro-Politics,” which stipulates that the price of oil and the pace of freedom in petrolist states — states totally dependent on oil exports to run their economies — operate in an inverse correlation. As the price of oil goes down, the pace of freedom goes up because leaders have to educate and unleash their people to innovate and trade. As the price of oil goes up, the pace of freedom goes down because leaders just have to stick a pipe in the ground to stay in power.

Exhibit A: the Soviet Union. High oil prices in the 1970s suckered the Kremlin into propping up inefficient industries, overextending subsidies, postponing real economic reforms and invading Afghanistan. When oil prices collapsed to $15 a barrel in the late 1980s, the overextended, petrified Soviet Empire went bust.

In a 2006 speech entitled “The Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia,” Yegor Gaidar, a deputy prime minister of Russia in the early 1990s, noted that “the timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to Sept. 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market.

“During the next six months,” added Gaidar, “oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms. As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive.”

If we could bring down the price of oil, the Islamic Republic — which has been buying off its people with subsidies and jobs for years — would face the same pressures. The ayatollahs would either have to start taking subsidies away from Iranians, which would only make the turbaned shahs more unpopular, or empower Iran’s human talent — men and women — and give them free access to the learning, science, trade and collaboration with the rest of the world that would enable this once great Persian civilization to thrive without oil.

Let’s get serious: An American Green Revolution to end our oil addiction — to parallel Iran’s Green Revolution to end its theocracy — helps us, helps them and raises the odds that whoever wins the contest for power, there will have to be a reformer. What are we waiting for?

 With Iran so prominent in the news these days, and with the UN again so low in what concerns its potential for doing any good in matters such as North Korea or Iran, I thought to dig into www.SustainabiliTank.info archives to see what we wrote when the UN General Assembly passed without actual vote, January 26, 2007, the resolution forbidding the denial of the Holocaust which some thought it was a vote of Cain against Ahmadi-Nejad - but was it? In the best case this was a vote of 104 UN member states which leaves out 88 States. Our posting at the time tried to analyze the actual vote for which the UN organization refused to give us country lists - after all too many of the UN officials were not exactly enthused with that effort led by just several of the more advanced US members. Rereading that posting makes for an interesting wake-up call even today.

Also of interest, in the President’s the chair at the time at the UN Geneal Assembly sat an Arab Muslim woman -H.E. Sheikha Haya Rasheed Al Khalifa of the Royal Bahrain rulling family.

The UN Resolution Against Holocaust Deniers: A Litmus Test To The Integrity Of The UN.

Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 27th, 2007
by Pincas Jawetz ( PJ at SustainabiliTank.com)

 http://www.sustainabilitank.info/2007/01…

As Sri Lanka Arrests Two UN Staff, UNHCR Offers Praise After Staying Silent.

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, June 19 — Two UN staff members were disappeared by the Sri Lankan government six days ago in Vavuniya. For days, the UN said nothing. An e-mail was sent to Inner City Press, along with a photo of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon meeting with the staff in Vavuniya on May 23. Those disappeared served as drivers for the UN Office of Project Services and UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency.

After some inquiries, the UN belatedly announced that two staff had been arrested, leading to short articles in the Indian and Canadian press, neither of which included the staff members’ names. They are Kandasamy “Saundi” Saundrarajan of UNOPS and N. Charles Raveendran of UNHCR. They are Tamils.

Meanwhile UNHCR’s country officer for Sri Lanka Amin Awar continued to praise the government and the internment camps in Vavuniya. While in Sri Lanka in May, Inner City Press published a story about another UNHCR staffer, detained by the government since last year.

Amin Awar, who had not responded to an emailed request to comment on the case, approached this reporter in the lobby of the Colombo Hilton on May 23 and argued that the court system in Sri Lanka is complex, but said he was advocating for the detained man.

No update has been provided, and now two more staffers, including one from UNHCR, are detained. How much more will the UN put up with, or as some say, cover up?

The email, lightly edited, is below.

UN’s Ban and Vavuniya staff, standing up for them not shown

Subj: 2 UN Staff abducted 4 days ago and now believed to be tortured by Sri Lankan Army Military Intelligence - Pls Help to Release them

From: [Name withheld for fear of retaliation or worse]
To: Matthew.Lee [at] innercitypress.com
Sent: 6/19/2009

Dear Matthew,

We write this email in desperation seeking your help to put more pressure on Sri Lankan Authorities and release 2 United Nations Staff ( I from UNOPS and 1 from UNHCR ) abducted by Sri Lankan Army Military Intelligence Officials in Vavuniya four days ago and currently detained. We have tried all the possible escalations within UN, including an urgent message to our Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon but nothing has helped so far.

We reliably learn that they are now being detained and tortured at a Sri Lankan Army Military Intelligence interrogation camp in Kurumankadu, Vavuniya and since it is weekend no one is taking it serious & taking some bold action for their release or access to them & ensure they are safe.

In our May30th Sit Report, our ground officers have highlighted the wide spread abductions and accounted for more than 13,310 missing people in Vavuniya IDP Camps, compared to the previous count. But our higher management in Colombo and Geneva has decided to downplay it and reported it as, “decrease is associated with double counting. Additional verification is required”. They never initiated a project for additional verification. Now we feel the pain of abduction when two of our colleagues are abducted.

Photo of our Vavuniya UN Team Group Photo with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon when he visited Vavuniya last month, attached.

We don’t know when we will see our colleagues again and the same smile … please help.

Due to security issues we cant talk on phone and sending this email with great difficulty & hope you will understand it.

Thanks in advance.

Concerned UN Staff, Sri Lanka

* * * * * *
In Sri Lanka Camps, UN Blind and Deaf Without Cameras or Cell Phones, African Concern.

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, June 19 –While it has been reported that in the UN-funded internment camps in Sri Lanka “UN officials have been stopped from bringing in cameras and mobile phones,” the Spokesperson for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday told Inner City Press, “I don’t think the UN would accept that.”

Since the UN did accept the detention by the government of UN staff earlier this year, it is not clear if the UN would accept being barred from exposing abuses they see in the camps or even photographing them. The Spokesperson said she would check. We’ll be waiting.

Despite these reported restrictions the UN’s top humanitarian John Holmes, who has yet to respond to requests for comment on the government killing off its investigation into the murder of 17 Action Contre La Faim aid workers, is quoted that “We do have pretty much full access to those camps at the moment.”

Would that be, access without cell phones or cameras? What does OCHA do when it becomes aware of abuses? It claimed that it advocated quietly about its detained staff. But the government said the issue was only raised once it was publicly asked about by the Press at the UN.

UN’s Ban speaks with envoy Fowler, kidnapped in Niger, on cell phone not seen in Sri Lanka

At a UN reception Friday day on the topic of sickle-cell anemia, several African Ambassadors expressed to Inner City Press their concern for what has happened this year in Sri Lanka. An Ambassador from the Maghreb asked, whatever happened to the Responsibility to Protect? Before that final push, shouldn’t somebody have stopped it?

Another referred to reports that LTTE officials who tried to surrender by waving the white flag, after communications via UN envoy Vijay Nambiar, had reportedly been shot and killed. “That is not good,” said the outgoing Permanent Representative of a country that itself suffered a genocide. Ironically, these African Ambassadors who are portrayed as more callous than their Western counterparts appear more genuinely concerned. But politics has dictated what has happened, and what is happening. Watch this site.

Destroying Indigenous Populations
Saturday 20 June 2009
by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t

Most of the Sioux’s land has been taken, and what remains has been laid waste by radioactive pollution.
The Fort Laramie Treaty once guaranteed the Sioux Nation the right to a large area of their original land, which spanned several states and included their sacred Black Hills, where they were to have “the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of the land.

However, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, President Ulysses S. Grant told the army to look the other way in order to allow gold miners to enter the Sioux Nation territory. After repeated violations of the exclusive rights to the land by gold prospectors and by migrant workers crossing the reservation borders, the US government outright seized the Black Hills land in 1877.

Charmaine White Face, an Oglala Tetuwan who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation, is the spokesperson for the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council (TSNTC), established in 1893 to uphold the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. She is also coordinator of the voluntary group, Defenders of the Black Hills, that works to preserve and protect the environment where they live.

“We call gold the metal which makes men crazy,” White Face told Truthout while in New York to attend the annual Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations in late May. “Knowing they could not conquer us like they wanted to … because when you are fighting for your life, or the life of your family, you will do anything you can … or fighting for someplace sacred like the Black Hills you will do whatever you can … so they had to put us in prisoner of war camps. I come from POW camp 344, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. We want our treaties upheld, we want our land back.”

Most of the  Sioux’s land has been taken, and what remains has been laid waste now by radioactive pollution. - “Nothing grows in these areas - nothing can grow. They are too radioactive,” White Face said.

Although the Black Hills and adjoining areas are sacred to the indigenous peoples and nations of the region, their attempts at reclamation are not based on religious claims but on the provisions of the Constitution. The occupation of indigenous land by the US government is in direct violation of its own law, according to White Face.

She references Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

The spokesperson for the TSNTC declares, “We need our treaty upheld. We want it back. Without it we are disappearing. They might have made us into brown Americans who speak the English language and eat a different kind of food, and are not able to live with the buffalo like we are supposed to, but that is like a lion in a cage. You can feed it and it will reproduce, but it is only a real lion when it gets its freedom and can be who it’s supposed to be. That’s how we are. We are like that lion in a cage. We are not free right now. We need to be able to govern ourselves the way we did before.”

Delegations from the TSNTC began their efforts in the United Nations in 1984 after exhausting all strategies for solution within the United States.

Homeland Contamination

There is uranium all around the Black Hills, South and North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. Mining companies came in and dug large holes through these lands to extract uranium in the 1950’s and 1960’s prior to any prohibitive regulations. Abandoned uranium mines in southwestern South Dakota number 142. In the Cave Hills area, another sacred place in South Dakota used for vision quests and burial sites, there are 89 abandoned uranium mines.

In an essay called “Native North America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” political activists Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke state that former US President Richard Nixon declared the 1868 Treaty Territory a “National Sacrifice Area,” implying that the territory, and its people, were being sacrificed to uranium and nuclear radiation.

The worst part, according to White Face, is that, “None of these abandoned mines have been marked. They never filled them up, they never capped them. There are no warning signs … nothing. The Forest Service even advertises the Picnic Springs Campground as a tourist place. It’s about a mile away from the Cave Hills uranium mines.”

The region is honeycombed with exploratory wells that have been dug as far down as six to eight hundred feet. In the southwestern Black Hills area, there are more than 4,000 uranium exploratory wells. On the Wyoming side of the Black Hills, there are 3,000 wells. Further north into North Dakota, there are more than a thousand wells.

  The Black Hills and its surroundings are the recharge area for several major aquifers in the South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming regions. The crisis can be gauged from the simple description that White Face gives: “When the winds come, they pick up the [uranium] dust and carry it; when it rains or snows, it washes it down into the aquifers and groundwater. Much of this radioactive contamination then finds its way into the Missouri River.”

She informs us that twelve residents out of about 600 of the sparsely populated county of Cave Hills have developed brain tumors. A nuclear physicist has declared one mine in the area to be as radioactively “hot” as ground zero of Hiroshima.

Red Shirt, a village along the Cheyenne River on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, has had its water tested high for radiation and local animals have died after consuming fish from the river.

After three daughters of a family and their mother died of cancer, a family requested White Face to have the municipal water tested. The radiation levels were found to be equal to those inside an x-ray machine. Little wonder then that the surviving sons and their father are afflicted with the disease. People procuring their grain and cattle from the region are advised to be extra cautious.

One cannot but feel the desperation of her people when White Face bemoans, “It’s pure genocide for us. We are all dying from cancer. We are trying not to become extinct, not to let the Great Sioux Nation become extinct.”

The Ogala Sioux are engaged in ongoing legal battles with the pro-uranium state of South Dakota. They are aware of the unequal nature of their battle, but they cannot afford to give up. White Face explains how “… Our last court case was lost before learning that the judge was a former lawyer for one of the mining companies. Also, the governor’s sister and brother-in-law work for mining companies [Powertech] and a professor, hired by the Forest Service to test water run-off for contamination, is on contract with a company that works for the mining company. When I found out the judge was a lawyer for the mining company I knew we would lose, but we went ahead with the case for the publicity, because we have to keep waking people up.”

Other tribes, such as the Navajo and Hopi in New Mexico, have been exposed to radioactive material as well. Furthermore, the July 16, 1979, spill of 100 million gallons of radioactive water containing uranium tailings from a tailing pond into the north arm of the Rio Puerco, near the small town of Church Rock, New Mexico, also affected indigenous peoples in Arizona.

Her rage and grief are evident as White Face laments, “When we have our prayer gatherings we ask that no young people come to attend. If you want to have children don’t come to Cave Hills because it’s too radioactive.”

The exploitative approach to the planet’s resources and peoples that led to these environmental and health disasters collides with White Face’s values: “I always say that you have to learn to live with the earth, and not in domination of the earth.”

—————

   Nuking the Colonies

The US government practices another approach. In occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, the uranium that has caused genocide of sorts at home has proceeded to wreak new havoc.

Two Iraqi NGO’s, the Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq (MHRI) and the Conservation Center of Environment and Reserves in Fallujah (CCERF) have extensively documented the effects of restricted weapons, such as depleted uranium (DU) munitions, against the people of Fallujah during two massive US military assaults on the city in 2004.

In March 2008, the NGO’s were to present a report titled “Prohibited Weapons Crisis: The effects of pollution on the public health in Fallujah” to the 7th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council

Muhammad al-Darraji, director, MHRI and president, CCERF, was to present the report with an appeal, “We are kindly asking the High Commissioner for Human Rights to look at the content of the report in accordance with the General Assembly’s resolution 48/ 141 (paragraph 4) of 20 December 1993, to investigate the serious threat (to the) health right in Fallujah and Iraq, and to relay the results of this investigation to the Commission on Human Rights to take the suitable decisions.”

Attached to the aforementioned is another report co-authored by Dr. Najim Askouri, a nuclear physicist trained in Britain and a leading Iraqi nuclear researcher and Dr. Assad al-Janabi, director of the Pathology Department at the 400-bed public hospital in Najaf. Their report includes a section on the “Depleted Uranium Crisis” from Najaf, 180 miles from where DU was used in the First Gulf War.

Dr. Najim begins the report by noting that Coalition Forces, mostly US, used 350 tons of DU weapons in about 45 days in 1991, primarily in the stretch of Iraq northwest of Kuwait where Iraqi troops were on their retreat. Then, in 2003, during the Shock and Awe bombing of Baghdad, the US used another 150 tons of DU. He says that cancer is spreading from the conflict area as a health epidemic and will only get worse. The cancer rate has more than tripled over the last 16 years in Najaf.

According to Dr. Najim, “When DU hits a target, it aerosolizes and oxidizes, forming a uranium oxide that is two parts UO3 and one part UO2. The first is water soluble and filters down into the water aquifers and also becomes part of the food chain as plants take up the UO3 dissolved in water. The UO2 is insoluble and settles as dust on the surface of the earth and is blown by the winds to other locations. As aerosolized dust, it can enter the lungs and begin to cause problems as it can cross cell walls and even impact the genetic system.”

One of Dr. Najim’s grandsons was born with congenital heart problems, Down Syndrome, an underdeveloped liver and leukemia. He believes that the problems are related to the child’s parents having been exposed to DU.

Detailing a skyrocketing rate of cancer and other pollution-related illnesses among the population of Fallujah since the two sieges, the report states, “Starting in 2004 when the political situation and devastation of the health care infrastructure were at their worst, there were 251 reported cases of cancer. By 2006, when the numbers more accurately reflected the real situation, that figure had risen to 688. Already in 2007, 801 cancer cases have been reported. Those figures portray an incidence rate of 28.21 [per 100,000] by 2006, even after screening out cases that came into the Najaf Hospital from outside the governorate, a number which contrasts with the normal rate of 8-12 cases of cancer per 100,000 people.

“Two observations are striking. One, there has been a dramatic increase in the cancers that are related to radiation exposure, especially the very rare soft tissue sarcoma and leukemia. Two, the age at which cancer begins in an individual has been dropping rapidly, with incidents of breast cancer at 16 (years of age), colon cancer at 8 (years of age), and liposarcoma at 1.5 years (of age).” Dr. Assad noted that 6 percent of the cancers reported occurred in the 11-20 age range and another 18 percent in ages 21-30.

“The importance of this information confirms there is a big disaster in this city…. The main civilian victims of most illnesses were the children, and the rate of them represents 72 percent of total illness cases of 2006, most of them between the ages of 1 month and 12 years…. Many new types and terrible amounts of illnesses started to appear [from] 2006 until now, such as Congenital Spinal cord abnormalities, Congenital Renal abnormalities, Septicemia, Meningitis, Thalassemia, as well as a significant number of undiagnosed cases at different ages. The speed of the appearance these signals of pollution after one year of military operations refers to the use of a great amount of prohibited weapons used in 2004 battles. The continued pollution maybe will lead to a genetic drift, starting to appear with many abnormalities in children, because the problems were related to exposure of the child’s parents to pollution sources and this may lead to more new abnormalities in the f uture. According to the security situation with many checkpoints and irregular cards to allow the civilians to enter or exit the city until now, all this helps to continue the terrible situation for this time. Therefore, we think that all these data is only 50 percent of the real numbers of illnesses.”

The Sioux tell their youth to avoid their radioactive native lands if they wish to procreate and prosper. Those in Iraq have no option but to lead maimed lives in their native land.

On February 4, 2009, Muhammad al-Darraji sent President Barack Obama a letter, along with the aforementioned report. A few excerpts are presented here:

“We have the honor to submit with this letter our report on the effects on public health of prohibited weapons used by the United States during its military operations in Fallujah (March-November 2004). It was our intention to present the report to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations on 4 March 2008, but both security and political reasons played a significant role in making this task impossible. The report, now in your hands, contains vast evidence and documentation on the catastrophic and continuous pollution in Iraq (to prevent) which nobody has taken any real action to help the victims or clean up polluted places. Some months ago, and in June 2008, I sent this report directly to some US congressmen. Two of them went to my town, Fallujah, and visited the general hospital to investigate the claims contained in our report. No substantial result came out of this visit. In February 2009 one of my colleagues, who worked in the hospital’s statistical office and helped gather information about the pollution, was killed by unknown individuals. The blood of my friend is the driving force that led me to write to you directly in order for you to release the facts for which my friend paid with his life. Therefore, we are kindly asking you to look at the content of the attached report and to investigate the serious threats to the right to life of the inhabitants of Fallujah and other polluted places in Iraq, as well as to publicly release the results of this investigation under right of information about what really happened in Iraq.”

The president has yet to respond.

The silence of the powerful media about the UN.

Josep Xercavins i Valls *

“The Conference on the crisis: a key moment for the future of the UN” and/or “The silence of the powerful media about what is happening at the UN”

In a few days the “UN Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development” will take place in the United Nations Headquarters in New York, from 24 to 26 June 2009.

It is currently impossible to say how this conference is going to end. However, according to the process that led to this conference -with two main experts like D’Escoto and Stiglitz - and to the contents of its negotiation, we can probably say that it will mark a moment in history. On the one hand, for the future actions that will be carried out to put an end to the global crisis. On the other, for the impact it may produce on the future of the UN, especially (or not) on its future role in financial and economic governance. Last but not least, in relation to the crucial performance of the media when having to report about these subjects. This text discusses the power of the media and the future of the UN.

Above observation about the Press and the UN sounds like a joke.

Please see what we e-mailed to Mr. Gary Fowlie as we wanted to cover exactly this event - we were not honored with a reply as to-date.

***

To:  Mr. Gary Fowlie, Chief, Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit, United Nations Department of Public Information.

From: Pincas Jawetz, editor-in-chief The Sustainable Development Media Think Tank servicing www.SustainabiliTank.info

Date: June 16, 2009

Subject: Accreditation for the purpose of covering the June 24 - June 26, 2009, United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development to be held at UN Headquarters in New York.

Dear Mr. Fowlie,

As per UN published material - I quote and attach bellow - you are personally in charge of the accreditation process - and with the history of your full knowledge of my own person and the media outlet that I have helped create, the fact that I am actually the editor in chief at www.SustainabiliTank.info - a worldwide recognized online media outlet - I apply directly to you in this e-mail to obtain the above mentioned accreditation.

a. I am the appointing officer of our media and I appoint myself - So this is my self-accreditation letter and letter of assignment.

b. My photocopies of Press card and Passport are - I trust - in your files - if you do not have them anymore they clearly will be provided in person.

c. I understand the need for an on-line accreditation form, but if I do not get your OK for my accreditation - according to history - it will just turn into a waste of time if I start the usual way.

d. As you know above UN meeting is on the top of interest priorities of our global readership, and it would be nice to serve them direct information from covering this from within the UN building.

Sincerely yours,

Pincas Jawetz

***

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The  Josep Xercavins i Valls * follows:
“The silence of the powerful media about what is happening at the UN”

What a pity! There were, there are and there will be so many things to explain, to analyze and to discuss in connection to the current crisis that I can not but claim against one of the worst manipulations of our times: the “unbearable” silence of the media about this UN Conference. An especially unbearable silence since it is only “heard” on the side of the richest and most powerful. Two extremely opposite examples prove these statements:

1. The powerful media could not do anything against the conference. On May 24, the New York Times published a very harsh article by Neil MacFarquhar, in which D’Escoto was described as “a ranking Sandinista and the fractious president of the United Nations GA”. Anyone can read it and form an opinion about it. The article gets quite distorted when it says that D’Escoto bases his proposals on a report by the Stiglitz Commission (not that caricaturable), a statement that the reader can only find at the end of the article - in an article that is hard to read.

What is really interesting, though, is the fact that -surprisingly- the article was not echoed by other media. They probably preferred to ignore it rather than vilify it. In my opinion, it was more dangerous for their interests to spread the word about the conference: they would then run the risk that someone may talk about its contents and even get excited about it.

2. An article of the author writing these lines, only published in the Other News of Roberto Savio (whose motto I’m “copying” now is a phrase appeared on the wall of Barcelona’s old Customs Office, at the beginning of 2003: “What walls utter, media keeps silent”), has appeared in some thousands of Spanish-speaking web pages (the English version was late and then I did not deem it appropriate to distribute it - what I now regret). The article was called: “From the G20 to the G192 -the UN- : At last, a real answer to the crisis?”

Obviously, in this case, the reason of this self-spreading over the Net was not the author’s name (totally unknown); it must be the interest for the subject itself. Therefore, and to use the terminology surrounding the crisis, there was and there is “market” for the subject. ¡Of course! In short, once again, the strategy has been to avoid talking about the conference and its contents, in order to avoid thinking a real alternative to the mentioned hegemony.

Apart from the seriousness of such silence, what is really alarming is that the citizens all over the world have been deprived of the necessary information to form their own opinion and to put pressure or not, in any direction, with regards to what is being discussed these days at the UN. As a result, the governmental representatives are busy in one of the most important processes in recent times, and yet in the dark. The only information about it is offered by the civil society organisations that, under the name of the “Global Social and Economic Group Crisis Group”, try to do the follow up, to lobby and inform about what is happening in the New York headquarters. This is allowing me, for instance, to write this article but, unfortunately, the power of the public opinion will not arrive in time.

It is not the moment to go into this in depth, but it is becoming clearer and clearer the urging need to fight for the freedom and the right to truthful and plural information about what is happening in the world.

“The Conference about the crisis: a key moment for the future of the UN”

The present global crisis is so important that also offer a window of opportunity in terms of global governance. At least, the crisis is playing and will play a substantial role in determining which “institutional” actors, which multi-polar international relations, which multilateral organisations, etc. will be more or less well placed in the political section of the “financial and economic tsunami”.

For the rich and most powerful countries -where the crisis, its causes and its first consequences were born and developed- the better would have been that nothing had changed in the political arena.  With a “dead” Bush, our current French “Napoleon”, Sarkozy, organised the first “party” of the G20, to pretend that things would change so that, as always, nothing changes.

An extraordinary meeting of the G8 would have been much more appropriate. These states (some more than others) were responsible for the crisis and, therefore, it was their duty to assume responsibilities and arrange things in their own homes.

Before the G20 meeting, one statement by the Forum UBUNTU raised some of the details of the situation:

1. Our perplexity, because the main protagonists who have worked to impose this model over the last 25 years, the G7 and the Bretton Woods Institutions (the IMF and the WB), are now taking on the role of saviours in this disaster, when they should rather be seen as the guilty parties to a large degree, and should consequently accept the responsibilities that pertain to them.

2. Our indignation regarding the meeting called for 14 November in Washington for, among others, the following reasons:

a. That precisely Washington, home of the Government and Organisations most responsible politically for what is now happening, is the one calling the meeting.

b. That invitations to the meeting have been issued in a totally arbitrary and discriminatory form. As if, for example, the poorest countries, those who have suffered most from this model and will probably suffer most from the consequences of the current debacle, had nothing to say about what to do now and in the future.

c. That it not only fails to take advantage of but even overshadows the Doha Conference on Financing for Development to Review the Implementation of the Monterrey Consensus, scheduled for 29 November to 2 December, especially when this Consensus includes a section on systemic - structural issues, which have been worked on for months in the United Nations’ most pluralistic and transparent framework, and which, appropriately reviewed and extended in the current context, could contribute to opening the way to a new world economic and financial model.

The G20 went by, above all, as a big media circus to stop any possible alternative movement, and the Doha Conference 2008 came, unfortunately despite predictably enough, to nothing.

However, history has its own ins and outs. The General Assembly of the UN is been presided since last September - although the appropriate election was carried out months earlier - by Father Miguel D’Escoto. Because of his strong determination, he dared to open a new approach, different of the G20’s one, to look, analyze and to propose about the crisis: the “Stiglitz Commission” (created, by the way, just a few weeks before the first meeting of the G20) and he also managed to introduce the following article on the Doha Declaration 2008:

79. The United Nations will hold a Conference at the highest level on the world financial and economic crisis and its impact on development. The Conference will be organised by the President of the UN General Assembly and its modalities will be defined by March 2009 at the latest.

It was not in March, nor the first week of June, but now it seems impossible that the Conference does not take place the last week of June. We will later have more time to relate all the obstacles that were overcome to get to this end.

Although d’Escoto managed to get approved an article (the above article) whose  restrictive reading would prevent the Conference to treat further matters other than the effects of the crisis on development - an argument repeatedly used at the negotiations’ table by, amongst others, the US and Europe -, our ‘Father D’Escoto’ has grabbed the opportunity and put all his energy in, precisely, transforming the Conference into a milestone, possibly ‘historic’, that can place the UN at the front of the world financial and economic governance.

In an interview with Cuba’s official newspaper Gramma (which denotes either a certain naivety or an excess of confidence…), Father D’Escoto explains:

We are facing a totally unprecedented situation. We have to remember that it is been always prohibited for the General Assembly to discuss or intervene in international financial affairs, such matters were reserved to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WBG) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). But this situation cannot continue like this… So this summit to be held in June will be the first opportunity in the history of the United Nations to tell everyone: ‘come and lets all talk’. We are -and we must be - in the 21st Century, the Century of Reconciliation and of inclusive democracy. We do not want only the G-8 or the G-20 to be the ones that speak or take decisions, we will respect their criteria (opinions), we will listen, but in a real democracy, the majority decides, that is why I have started to insist that the voice of the G-192 must be THE voice, that of all members of the United Nations. There are good feelings about the meeting, convened at the highest level, because this battle has to be made at the United Nations in order to participate democratically in the design of a new financial, economic, monetary and trade architecture. That is what we pretend to do. I think that the meeting in June will be considered as the first session of a meeting that will be kept open.

It is indeed the role of the United Nations what really is under discussion these days, about its role in governing financial and economic issues. It is therefore an incredible window of opportunity, in the short and medium term, to achieve a UN different from what it is today. That is, from a UN that is the complex and contradictory result of:

a) a physical place where the Security Council hosts the winners of the Second World War; b) the main reference of international law around the various Human Rights Declarations; c) a necessary humanitarian agency, although with a lot to improve, as it is normally the case in all human endeavours; d) etc.

to a UN that is a real institution of world democratic governance (which can only be achieved and exerted when politics decide over finances and economy). A UN that is the real expression of consensus-building capacity - whenever it is possible - amongst the states of the world, or else the result of democratic majorities reached in the General Assembly. Despite the usual criticisms about the democratic legitimacy of the UN General Assembly where each member state has a vote - something that must be corrected, but that this text will not deal with -, the reality tends to correct it as key decisions reflect the relative positions of the biggest current groupings (US, Europe, G77 and China, Russia, etc.).

And finally, if I write these lines today and now, it is because I see some signs for hope:

1) a certain re-composition of the G77 (the group of 140 countries that normally negotiates together as the voice of the developing countries) that, having recovered those members who shared tablecloths with rich and powerful countries in the G20 meetings, is now together behind proposals such as the creation of a Economic Security Council or the review of the harmful agreement (and original sin of the multilateral international organisations) between the UN and the Bretton Woods Institutions to bring them back under the real and effective supervision and coordination of a strengthened ECOSOC; and

2) the feeling that the Obama US, even with a confused Europe, has not put up much resistance to debating and negotiating all these issues given the strength -immeasurable and maybe immaterial- of “our Father D’Escoto”.

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*Josep Xercavins i Valls, Professor at Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC); former coordinator of the UBUNTU Forum Secretariat

The Prologue:

The Dear Leader Kim Jong Il  and The Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei seem to present to the world their proud contention of being indeed The Axis of Evil that was originally suggested by former President G.W. Bush. (Bush had there also Saddam Hussein, and John Bolton was claiming also the rights of Fidel Castro, Muammar al-Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad. Since then Saddam Hussein is gone and his country is normalizing slowly, and the Bolton three are at various stages of trying to undo their fame.) What is clear is that a country is not evil - only its leader can be evil. He can nevertheless influence his people and the country as a whole can become then dangerously evil. That is what happened to Germany and Austria under Adolf Hitler  - The FUERER or THE LEADER -  and that might happen now to North Korea under Kim Jong Il, while there is hope that this is not the case of Iran where the young people may show that they did not absorb the indoctrination that is being dished out in those mosques.

Enter a new US President - Barack Hussein Obama - and he declares that we do not play anymore the game of blame. There is no evil we should not attempt to talk with, and that was completely fine with us. He indeed tried to address the real problems of the world but Jong Il and Ali Khamenei seem to insist that they cannot be by-passed - they want to be recognized as holdovers  entitled  to the crown of evil.

Enter a fly to the White House, in full view of world TV, and forces President Obama to take a resolute immediate reaction - the fly gets squished!

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The Drama:

The students and younger generation, also the internet enlightened women of Iran, they see the obvious - the elections in which they participated in a symbolic vote for Mr. Moussavi, where highhandedly high-jacked by President Ahmadi-Nejad. They chose to go to the street to protest the fact that their symbolic vote was not counted.

They know that Moussavi was also agreed upon by The Supreme Leader, but they liked the contender’s wife who stood by him during the campaign. This was progress, and they were ripe to submit to slow progress - as long as there will be change. Surely, they would prefer faster change, but change in a positive direction was change nevertheless, and they blessed on it.

The Supreme Leader’s support of Ahmadi-Nejad’s holding onto power - honesty or not - has now the potential of turning the obvious into real rebellion - and this is a clear Iran problem. What should Washington do?

Obama is right - stay the course and stay out. the Supreme Leader with old Nazi style information training, will blame the US if it does or if it does not - but the Iranian people - at least a great part of them - will recognize the present US non-involvement and thus the Leader’s lies. It will strengthen their hand in their conviction that time has come for real change and indeed for a new Iranian revolution - this time without the US having caused it!

The same goes for the UK - stay out because in the past you did enough mischief in that part of the world and non-involvement now is the best way to stage the local people’s own involvement according to their own real interests.

 How does a sigle fly show the way to a wondering US President?

The story actually starts with Rene Descartes lying in bed, sometime in 1628, and watching flies. He was trying to track the flies’ position and he realized that he could describe a fly’s position by inventing coordinate geometry - that was the start of the Cartesian coordinate system and a philosophy with “Rules of the Direction of Mind,” that watching what the church did to Galileo in 1633, was eventually published only in 1701 (Descartes lived 1596 - 1650).

Seemingly, a descendant of that 1628 Cartesian fly entered the White House this week to lead President Obama in his search of what to do with Leaders of Evil.

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Some in Washington, like Senator John McCain, are trying to trip President Obama, this while the world is learning of the broken bones of precious team members - Robert Gates, Sonia Sotomayor and Hillary Clinton. Senator McCain would like the US to intervene in Iran and see more killing and direct harm to the US. That is his right of having no responsibility for his positions. We think he also did not contemplate in depth the Cartesian fly’s self-sacrifice. Others thought that Dick Cheney might like see the US in trouble in order to vindicate his own failed policies.

Today’s newspapers are full of stories about US fortifying Hawaii Defenses Against North Korean arms and missile threats. Now that is another yet to be cooked case of raw thinking.

More solid thinking suggests that if change in Iran does occur, there is chance that also it will impact on the nuclear issue, but if repression does not allow for change, there is a chance that the outside world changes and more powers are ready to hold Iran on a shorter leash.

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The Epilogue:

Obama - The President of the United States - learned from the fly incident that when a nasty intruder gets close to you - you just squish him. The facts are that he did not get up from his seat to chase out the intruding fly.

North Korea, has no velvet, orange, or green revolution - its youth has been brainwashed and all what they know is to march in lockstep. This is a very sorry situation and in Gilbert & Sullivan language - “they never shall be missed.” On the other hand - in Iran there is a new generation of talented people that might yet bring about change - that is in their own country - or as said if this did not work out - in our countries.

North Korea is a candidate for immediate squishing - Iran is not - but with a caveat!

So, when the first North Korean ship does not stop for inspection as ordered by the UN Security Council, give it short warning and SINK IT. Be ready to take on any other mischief from the Dear Leader and follow him to the end - this is the squishing part. They shall not be missed.

Iran, will watch what goes on with North Korea and learn. The larger lesson is that squishing does happen. The wise is expected to learn from this. The pinpointed study is that people that follow blindly a “Dear Leader” get punished eventually.

As per Earthjustice e.Brief  - to my horror, four months into the Obama Administration - we just found out that:

After years of delay and denial from past administrations, the Environmental Protection Agency is finally taking steps to declare that greenhouse gas emissions threaten the public’s health and welfare - which means they have not done it yet!The time has come for this action, and we need to encourage the EPA to move swiftly on it.

The EPA is proposing two historic findings under the Clean Air Act: that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, endanger public health, and that emissions from motor vehicles contribute to climate change. This is a critical first step for the EPA to take in order to tackle climate change pollution.

The findings follow a decision by the Supreme Court which said the EPA has authority to regulate pollutants responsible for global warming under the Clean Air Act. Earthjustice argued the case at the appellate level in 2005.

While the EPA’s current proposal is a necessary first step, there are additional steps the EPA can take, such as setting actual standards to regulate greenhouse gases, particularly from motor vehicles in the U.S., which contribute 4 percent of climate change emissions, and from other mobile sources such as ships and airplanes, which contribute another 4 percent.

We know that the EPA is hearing from polluters in the fossil fuel industry who want to keep the status quo, stop the EPA from moving forward, and protect their record-breaking profits. We can’t let them go unchallenged.

Please join with people across the nation and tell EPA to formally embrace these findings, and then act without delay to regulate greenhouse gas polluters.

Mr. Ban Ki-moon, with the obvious exception of some US judges, is now the main relic left from the appointments backed by the US Administration  of former President G.W. Bush. It is obvious that President Obama’s people will have to take a serious look at this if they would like to see a more forthcoming UN as part of their view of the World. We said so quite a while ago, and wonder how this slowly trickles now into the main media. This is specially interesting when the newspaper which we hold in highest esteem is pointing out this issue in such clear terms:

UN disquiet puts Ban’s second term in doubt.
By Harvey Morris at the United Nations
The Financial Times,  June 17 2009
Pervasive criticism of Ban Ki-moon’s performance as United Nations secretary-general, from within the organisation and among envoys assigned to it, is raising doubts about his prospects of a second term, according to senior officials and diplomats.

In an untypically robust defence of his stewardship, Mr Ban acknowledged last week that there had been negative assessments. However, he also drew attention to the challenges he had faced since he took the post as a compromise candidate at the start of 2007.

Approaching the mid-point of his first five-year term, Mr Ban told a press conference it was up to UN member states to decide whether he should serve a second.

“When the time comes, I hope the member states will judge what I will have achieved by that time,” he said. He complained that UN states were not backing him. “It is just impossible. I need more political support. I need more resources by the member states.”

In his own defence, Mr Ban said: “I have been working as the voice of the voiceless people, and defend those people who are defenceless.” But aides fret that his voice is not being heard loudly enough.

The questioning of Mr Ban’s record has become a staple of conversation among staff at the UN’s New York headquarters and of diplomatic chatter among the foreign missions that crowd midtown Manhattan.

The decisive judgment on his performance, however, will be that of member states, and specifically of the five permanent members of the Security Council that have a veto on a second term.

He received their unanimous backing in 2006 when the experienced South Korean career diplomat and former foreign minister offered a safe pair of hands to undertake the task of reforming a 60-year-old bureaucracy that the US and others regarded as dysfunctional. But Mr Ban expressed his frustration at the slow pace of internal reform: after spending 30 months in office he has only just got his senior management team in place.

On the world stage, however, he has left a shallow footprint, with his performance often contrasted with that of Kofi Annan, his predecessor.

His natural preference for conciliation - whether over Israel’s invasion of Gaza or Sri Lanka’s suppression of Tamil Tiger rebels - has been interpreted as appeasement by human rights groups and even by UN staff members.

One UN-watcher noted, however, that Mr Ban’s caution in speaking out firmly on some pressing issues was matched by a lack of resolution by the Security Council.

“The secretary-general’s leadership is crucial, but the failures must be brought home equally to the Security Council. On issues like Sri Lanka, where civilian suffering has been immense, the . . . council cannot even agree to put Sri Lanka on its regular agenda,” said Carne Ross, a former UK diplomat who heads Independent Diplomat, a New York-based non-profit advisory group.

“While there have clearly been some disappointments, a lot rests on Ban’s ability to deliver on his selfproclaimed number one priority: ’selling the deal’ on a new climate agreement in Copenhagen [in December],” Mr Ross said.

The European permanent members of the Security Council - the UK and France - are at best neutral towards Mr Ban, while the administration of Barack Obama, US president, is yet to reveal its hand on how it regards Mr Ban, a candidate appointed with the support of the previous Bush administration.

* Japan decided yesterday to tighten its sanctions against North Korea, stemming the trickle of exports that flows to the isolated communist state and introducing further restrictions on travel there. The decision was made ahead of a meeting yesterday between Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president, and Barack Obama in Washington.

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and further from the UN:

UN’s Ban Hit With Staff “No Confidence” Vote, on Asbestos, G to P, Tamil Protest

Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press: News Analysis

A UN GC City, June 16 — Reeling from low grades from the Economist and questions of viability in the Financial Times, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday was hit with a vote of “no confidence” from the UN Staff Union regarding implementation of the Capital Master Plan and the management of human resources.

The resolution criticizes Ban and his team for relocating staff to “swing space buildings before the security risk assessments were done,” for the manner of asbestos removal and for stifling meritocracy and “career advancement including the leap from G to P” — from general to professional staff.

Each of these issues has been festering for months, and most can be attributed back to the UN Department of Management, headed by Angela Kane. Ms. Kane herself has acknowledged a failure to communicate about the postponement of the National Competitive Exam, but similar issues exist around the G to P exam.

  The resolution was voted for by over 200 staff members at a meeting on June 16, with no opposition, one abstention. According to one attendee, “the mood was one of distrust, of Angela Kane, Michael Adlerstein and Ban Ki-moon. It was stated again and again that Management is not acting in a responsible, safe or appropriate manner.”

CMP chief Michael Adlerstein first said the security risk assessments were done, then referred all questions to the Department of Safety and Security, whose Bruno Henn “no commented” the issue.

Ms. Angela Kane, beyond an icy relationship with the UN Staff Union, has lashed out at the press, specifically and generally, first proposing for the first time in the history of UN Headquarters to charge journalists money to cover it, then trying to subject whistleblowers to exposure.  The pretext is an open office plan which the resolution notes was “never negotiated with the staff representatives.”

Ms. Kane has complained that the UN’s responses are not published, while telling the Press that she has no time to answer questions.

The Economist magazine gave Mr. Ban a failing grade of two out of ten on management. When Inner City Press asked Mr. Ban for his response, his statement was passionate, but largely laid the blame elsewhere. But this new “no confidence” vote does not bode well.

Additionally, as Inner City Press previously reported, Ban may be subject to a rare street protest on the night of June 17, 2009, - that is tonight - when he and Bill Clinton are slated to receive a “global humanitarian award” at the St. Regis Hotel.

Further - Tamils who watched the bloodbath on the beach in Northern Sri Lanka and the UN withholding casualty figures and satellite photos blame Ban. 

While the UN ran two more weeks of climate change hot air in Bonn, the US and China negotiated for real in Beijing. As we keep saying - the answer is in Washington and Beijing all the rest is really a waste of time on that road to Copenhagen. Will there be a US-China agreement before December? At least an agreement to make sure that by 2010 there will be a solid new Framework?

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America and China talk climate change
Heating up or cooling down?
Jun 11th 2009 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition
The big two emitters try to stop finger-pointing and save the planet

THOUSANDS of officials from all over the world this week neared the end of two weeks of difficult talks in Bonn under the United Nations’ climate convention. But they were conscious that even more difficult and probably more important negotiations were under way in Beijing. America’s most senior climate-change officials were meeting their Chinese counterparts. The two countries are by far the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. They will determine whether a worthwhile global treaty to limit emissions can be concluded as planned in Copenhagen in December.

The treaty is to replace the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012. Some 180 countries will take part in the negotiations, but many feel that, on this issue more than any other, China and America make up a “G2” that determines the global post-Kyoto agenda. Shortly before traveling to Beijing, America’s climate-change envoy, Todd Stern, said that, though China may not be the “alpha and omega” of the international process, it was close. His delegation included President Barack Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, and David Sandalow, the assistant energy secretary.

Details of the talks were scanty. Mr Stern was able to call them “a step in the right direction on the road to Copenhagen”. But progress is painstaking. Zha Daojiong, an energy-security expert at Peking University, says that, although he himself disagrees, many Chinese still feel the world’s original big polluters should be the first to pay for cleaning things up. Others suspect American critics see the issue as yet another stick in a relentless campaign to bash China. As one American official acknowledges, climate change is emerging as the biggest issue in bilateral relations, supplanting trade and human rights.

For their part, American critics of China make much of the rapid growth in its energy consumption. Indeed, in 2007 China overtook America as the world’s leading carbon emitter, with an estimated 1.8 billion tonnes of fossil-fuel emissions. As it decides how America should curb its own emissions, Congress remains keenly aware that potentially painful and costly steps will mean little if China stays on anything approaching its current trajectory.

China asserts its simple right to develop rapidly and make progress towards attaining Western living standards. It also points out that its consumption and emission levels per head remain a mere fraction of America’s. Moreover, a large chunk of its emissions come from producing goods consumed by rich developed nations, which have exported much of their manufacturing industry to China.

Lastly, China points to its impressive improvements in energy efficiency and coal-plant cleanliness in recent years, and its increasingly ambitious commitments to invest in renewable energy sources. According to Deborah Seligsohn, based in Beijing for the World Resources Institute, an American think-tank, China has received too little credit for the steps it has already taken and its commitment to do more. Others argue that China’s leaders have decided both that the Obama administration is serious about climate change, and that China, especially in its drought-prone north, will be a big loser from global warming. On this analysis, they may adopt even more ambitious energy-efficiency targets, if not emissions limits.

Mr Zha urges America to refrain from browbeating China into accepting distant targets for future reductions. That, he said, would be a narrow and empty victory, since it is too late for vague visionary principles. What is needed instead, he argues, is a workable timetable under which America agrees to rethink restrictions on sophisticated exports to China, and Beijing reduces tariffs to encourage the import of cutting-edge green technology.

In this context, another development in Sino-American relations strikes a discordant note. Sichuan Tengzhong, a private Chinese company, is to buy the division of General Motors, a beleaguered American carmaker, that makes the Hummer, a gas-guzzling hulk. There could be few clearer illustrations of the shifting contours of the quarrel between rich and poor countries over who is more to blame for climate change and who should do more to arrest it. Looking more like a tank than a car, the Hummer for years seemed to embody the worst excesses of American consumerism. Now, unless Chinese regulators reject the deal, as they may, it will become another symbol of China’s commercial clout and polluting potential.

————–

and from Bonn - the usual hot air:

UN Climate Talks Advance, Poor Urge More CO2 Cuts

Date: 15-Jun-09
Reuters, Alister Doyle and Gerard Wynn

BONN, Germany - Climate talks made progress on Friday toward a new U.N. treaty to curb global warming but ended far short of calls by developing nations for the rich to make deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Four years of talks to widen the existing Kyoto Protocol have struggled to agree on how to share the cost of efforts to curb greenhouses gas mainly emitted by burning fossil fuels.

The United States and Europe warned in closing remarks on Friday that the private sector would finance the climate fight, not their governments.

“I look back on this as a significant session that has advanced our work in important ways,” Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told a news conference at the June 1-12 talks among 183 nations in Bonn.

He said governments staked out far clearer views after their first review of a draft legal text of the treaty due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December to succeed Kyoto.

But developing countries called for more, despite the global recession.

“We finally managed to have a positive exchange on the numbers” for developed nations, China’s climate ambassador Yu Qingtai told Reuters. “But still we hear repeated statements resisting calls for further meaningful cuts.”

China and many developing nations want the rich to cut by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to avoid the worst effects of global warming such as droughts, floods and rising sea levels.

Offers made by developed countries so far work out at cuts of between 8 and 14 percent below 1990, according to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

The United States and Europe poured cold water on hopes for major public funds, such as the 1 percent or more of national wealth demanded by many poor nations to help them avoid a model of high-carbon growth dominant since the Industrial Revolution.

“The key issue is not the number,” said Jonathan Pershing, head of the U.S. delegation, referring to “marginally” bigger investments to improve efficiency or to install low-carbon instead of polluting coal plants.

“We’d like to change that” view of developing countries that governments would bankroll the fight against climate change, he said, adding that carbon offset markets could play a big role.

The European Union also underscored that private finance would dominate in the climate change fight.

Pershing said progress in Bonn had been “slow,” and the European Commission’s Artur Runge-Metzger said “enormous effort” was required to get a deal in Copenhagen in December.

The United States expected China to undertake action, such as setting renewable energy targets, but not be legally bound to prove curbs. China and the United States are top emitters.

“We have advanced perhaps a couple of miles toward Copenhagen. We still have thousands to go,” said Jennifer Morgan of the London-based E3G think-tank. The next meeting will be in Bonn in August.

Outside the talks in a Bonn hotel, protesters brought along two live camels and laid out some sand to illustrate fears of creeping desertification. “We spit on weak targets,” one banner said, another said: “Shrinking targets, growing deserts.”

The chair of a group looking at new actions to curb emissions by all countries said a draft text had swollen with new ideas from about 50 pages to 200. Big breakthroughs were likely to happen only in Copenhagen, he said.

“This is like the evolutionary process in reverse. The Big Bang comes at the end,” said Michael Zammit Cutajar, of Malta.

——————-

and on the New York Times an article is full of optimism which is fine with us, but at this stage might be misleading like that famous pot that puts the lobster to sleep.

Climate Change Treaty, to Go Beyond the Kyoto Protocol, Is Expected by the Year’s End.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published, the New York Times, June 12, 2009.
The world is on track to produce a new global climate treaty by December, the top United Nations climate official said Friday as delegates from more than 100 nations concluded 12 days of talks in Bonn, Germany.

The delegates issued a 200-page document that they said would serve as the starting point for treaty negotiations that open in Copenhagen in December.

“Time is short, but we still have enough time,” the official, Yvo de Boer, who is the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said at a briefing. “I’m confident that governments can reach an agreement and want an agreement.”

The goal is a climate treaty that would go beyond the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a climate-change agreement that set emissions targets for industrialized nations. Many of those goals have not been met, and the United States never ratified the accord.

The document issued Friday outlines proposals for cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases by rich countries and limiting the growth of gases in the developing world. It also discusses ways of preventing deforestation, which is linked to global warming, and of providing financing for poorer nations to help them adapt to warmer temperatures.

But many environment advocates and politicians suggested that delegates had not made enough progress in winnowing down those options. “Of course we have to respect the way the United Nations works,” Denmark’s minister for climate and energy, Connie Hedegaard, said in a statement after the talks ended. “But to me, there is no doubt that things are moving too slow.”

Representatives of poor countries complained repeatedly in the talks that developed nations had not made an adequate commitment to reduce their emissions. They expressed particular dismay over Japan’s announcement this week to reduce emissions by only 8 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Shyam Saran, India’s envoy on climate change, called such targets “unsatisfactory.” China and other developing countries have demanded that richer nations reduce emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels in that period.

Experts described some of the back-and-forth as predictable jockeying in the months leading up to the make-or-break talks to negotiate a treaty in December.

Jonathan Pershing, who led the American delegation at the Bonn talks, said the discussions had unfolded about as fast as could be expected given the number of nations involved and the size of the task. He predicted a treaty would emerge in December.

He said that American negotiators acknowledged at the talks that “climate change is an urgent problem and it needs a global and immediate response.”

Despite the shortage of specific commitments, environmentalists took heart from the strong involvement of many nations, especially the United States and China, which jointly produce 40 percent of the world’s heat-trapping emissions. (In declining to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the United States cited China and India’s lack of participation.)

“There are a lot of options to work out, but we have come a long way,” said Alex Kaat, a spokesman for Wetlands International, which fights the destruction of rainforests and decaying bogs. “There is now text on paper, and that’s progress.”

Oil and Indians Don’t Mix.
Friday 12 June 2009
by: Greg Palast  |  Visit article original @ GregPalast.com

 http://www.truthout.org/061209A

{actually oil and all indigenous people that love their land and live on their land - this is no match up}

There’s an easy way to find oil. Go to some remote and gorgeous natural sanctuary, say Alaska or the Amazon, find some Indians, then drill down under them.

If the indigenous folk complain, well, just shoo them away. Shooing methods include: bulldozers, bullets, crooked politicians and fake land sales.

But be aware. Lately, the natives are shooing back. Last week, indigenous Peruvians seized an oil pumping station, grabbed the nine policemen guarding it and, say reports, executed them. This followed the government’s murder of more than a dozen rain forest residents, who had protested the seizure of their property for oil drilling.

So - Indians in Yurimaguas, Peru, have blocked the road in an anti-government protest - power to them. But can they win?

Again and again, I see it in my line of work of investigating fraud writes Greg Plast. Here are a few pit stops on the oily trail of tears:

In the 1980s, Charles Koch was found to have pilfered about $3 worth of crude from Stanlee Ann Mattingly’s oil tank in Oklahoma. Here’s the weird part. Koch was (and remains) the 14th richest man on the planet, worth about $14 billion. Stanlee Ann was a dirt-poor Osage Indian.

Stanlee Ann wasn’t Koch’s only victim. According to secret tape recordings of a former top executive of his company, Koch Industries, the billionaire demanded that oil tanker drivers secretly siphon a few bucks worth of oil from every tank attached to a stripper well on the Osage Reservation where Koch had a contract to retrieve crude.

Koch, according to the tape, would “giggle” with joy over the records of the theft. Koch’s own younger brother Bill ratted him out, complaining that, in effect, brothers Charles and David cheated him out of his fair share of the looting, which totaled over three-quarters of a billion dollars from the native lands.

The FBI filmed the siphoning with hidden cameras, but criminal charges were quashed after quiet objections from Republican senators.

Then there are the Chugach natives of Alaska. The Port of Valdez, Alaska, is arguably one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on earth, the only earthquake-safe, ice-free port in Alaska that could load oil from the giant North Slope field. In 1969, Exxon and British Petroleum companies took the land from the Chugach and paid them one dollar. I kid you not.

Wally Hickel, the former governor of Alaska, dismissed my suggestion that the Chugach deserved a bit more respect (and cash) for their property. “Land ownership comes in two ways, Mr. Palast.” explained the governor and pipeline magnate, “Purchase or conquest. The fact that your granddaddy chased a caribou across the land doesn’t make it yours.” The Chugach had lived there for 3,000 years.

No oil company would dream of digging on the Bush family properties in Midland, Texas, without paying a royalty. Or drilling near Malibu without the latest in environmental protections. But when natives are on top of Exxon’s or BP’s glory hole, suddenly, the great defenders of private property rights turn quite Bolshevik: Lands can be seized for The Public’s Need for Oil.

Some natives are “re-located” through legal flim-flam, some at gunpoint. The less lucky are left to wallow, literally, in the gunk left by the drilling process.

Chief Emergildo Criollo told me how oil company executives helicoptered into his remote village and, speaking in Spanish - which the Cofan didn’t understand - “purchased” drilling rights with trinkets and cheese. The natives had never seen cheese. (”The cheese smelled funny, so we threw it in the jungle.”)

After drilling began, Criollo’s son went swimming in his usual watering hole, came up vomiting blood and died.

  I asked Chevron about the wave of poisonings and deaths. According to an independent report, 1,401 deaths, mostly of children, mostly from cancers, can be traced to Chevron’s toxic dumping.

Chevron’s lawyer told me, “And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States? … They have to prove that it is our crude,” which, he noted with glee, “is absolutely impossible.”

Big Oil treats indigenous blood like a cheap gasoline additive. That’s why the Peruvians are up in arms. The Cofan of Ecuador, unlike their brothers in Peru, have taken no hostages. Rather, they have heavily armed themselves with lawyers.

But Chevron and its Big Oil brethren remain dismissive of the law. This week, Shell Oil, got rid of a nasty PR problem by paying $15 million to the Ogoni people and the family of Ken Saro-Wiwa for the oil giant’s alleged role in the killing of Wiwa and his associates, activists who had defended these Nigeria Delta people against drilling contamination. Shell pocketed $31 billion last year in profits and hopes the payoff will clear the way for a drilling partnership with Nigeria’s government.

Congratulations, Shell. $15 million: For a license to kill and drill, that’s a quite a bargain.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Henry Holt). A DVD of the documentary film based on his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available by clicking http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175082/m…

The US was incapable of taxing the use of oil, and has a hard time coming up with a climate law that bites into the problem - enough to make the world believe the US and join the US in tackling the issue.

So, the price of oil reached $73/barrel and the talk in Washington is again of “Drill Baby Drill” - Wolf Blitzer will have Sara Pailin on his program and what do you expect her to say?

With above in mind, I read two important articles in today’s papers and start questioning if there is not a renewed pandering by the US, even under the new Obama Administration,  of oil producing Gulf States? Do they think it will work?

The first article is the Financial Times editorial:

 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1d43d172-56b6-…

 Climate change for richer and poorer.
Published: June 11 2009

For now, we have hot air – not what you want when the topic for debate is CO2 emissions. But, only months before December’s Copenhagen meeting, where 181 countries are supposed to slug out a post-Kyoto protocol, bluster inevitably outweighs real concessions.

The biggest impasse is between China and the US, which together emit 40 per cent of the world’s carbon. The US is considering legislation that would cut emissions by 16-17 per cent from current levels by 2020 – roughly flat on 1990 levels, Kyoto’s baseline year. Japan this week went slightly better, offering an 8 per cent cut from 1990. The European Union offers 20 per cent; but with the EU already making good headway on cuts, this is a lesser concession than it looks.

China and India are dismissive. Beijing has raised the stakes by urging rich countries to cut emissions 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, and to pay huge sums to help poor countries cope with climate change. But everyone, China included, knows this is unrealistic. Its tough stance is an opening gambit, not a target outcome.

That stance is based on old arguments, but they are not less potent for being well-worn. The west has been polluting for 200 years and China’s per capita emissions are only one-fifth of those of the US. Some 40 per cent of Chinese energy use produces exports for western consumers. That Beijing has logic and morality on its side, however, does not mean we will not all perish by applying them.

Not all is lost. China, and even India, are doing more than they are letting on. But they cannot be seen as being lectured by the west: much of their tough talk is for domestic display. So neither wants to be penned in by binding commitments – but they do want to be more energy-efficient and less polluting. Notwithstanding the smog hanging over Chinese cities, Beijing really is trying to implement stricter environmental standards.

Developing countries will not accept absolute cuts. But there is talk behind the scenes of China “bending the curve” – slowing the rate of increase. That would be a start. The best outcome would be if poor-country emitters were willing to quantify such promises.

To achieve this, rich countries must lead. They must put money on the table so poor countries see financial gains from combating climate change. They should also offer genuine research and technology collaboration – cheap, but symbolically important for countries such as China. If rich countries move, they may find China and others are willing to respond.

The Second is an op-Ed article in Wall Street Journal:

 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12447633…

Why Israelis Are Cool on the Obama Speech - What’s needed is an affirmation of Israel’s historical right to exist.

By Judea Pearl

A friend asked me to explain why people in Israel, including seasoned peace activists, felt less than buoyant about Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo last week.

In theory, Mr. Obama’s speech has affirmed everything Israelis have ever hoped for. Peaceful coexistence and mutual acceptance with its Arab neighbors has been the ultimate dream of the Zionist movement since the Balfour Declaration of 1917. So, why not embrace a major U.S. presidential speech that calls for concrete steps to advance that dream?

My friend reminded me of the outburst of joy that seized the Jewish world on Nov. 29, 1947, when the United Nations voted to partition the Biblical land into a Jewish and an Arab state of roughly equal size. There was hardly a dissenting voice then among Israelis. Half a century later, the peace offers that Ehud Barak made to Yasser Arafat in 2000 and that Ehud Olmert made to Abu Mazen in 2009 prove that the idea of a two-state utopia is still firmly lodged in the psyche of most Israelis. Why then weren’t Israelis ecstatic over Mr. Obama’s speech?

There are two main reasons.

The first stems from crossed signals that are blocking the resumption of peace talks. Palestinians view Israeli settlement construction as the litmus test for Israel’s intentions vis-à-vis a future Palestinian state. Israelis view Palestinian textbooks, TV programs and mosque sermons to be the litmus test of Palestinian intentions. A society that teaches its youngsters to negate its neighbor’s legitimacy, so the argument goes, cannot be serious about respecting a peace accord as permanent.

Mr. Obama’s speech, keenly recognizing the importance of emitting trust-building signals to break the stalemate, had crisp and stern words to say about Israeli settlements but hardly a word about Palestinian denial and incitement. “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” the president said. “It is time for these settlements to stop.”

The hoped-for reciprocal sentence — “It is time for Palestinian incitements to stop” — was conspicuously absent. Commentaries on Israeli TV noted disappointedly that not a single demand was addressed to the Palestinian Authority.

This has left many Israelis wondering if the Obama administration is aware of the fierce, subterranean “battle of intentions” that has prevented the peace process from moving forward. In Israel, even the harshest opponent of the settlement movement would not support the emergence of a sovereign neighbor, rocket range away, that is unwilling to invest in education for a lasting peace.

A call for a simultaneous freeze on both Israeli settlements and Palestinian incitement, clad in timetables and monitoring methods, would have invited both sides to an equal honesty test. That test could help jump start the “new beginning” that Mr. Obama called for.

Secondly, Mr. Obama’s rationale for Israel’s legitimacy began with the Holocaust, not with the birthplace of Jewish history. “The aspiration for a Jewish homeland,” he said, “is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” Who else defines Israel’s legitimacy that way? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does. Iran sees Israel as a foreign entity to the region, hastily created to sooth European guilt over the Holocaust. Israelis consider this distortion of history to be an assault on the core of their identity as a nation.

An affirmation of “Israel’s historical right to exist,” based on a 2,000-year continuous quest to rebuild a national homeland, is what the region needs to hear from Mr. Obama. The magic words “historical right” have the capacity to change the entire equation in the Middle East. They convey a genuine commitment to permanence, and can therefore invigorate the peace process with the openness and goodwill that it has been lacking thus far.

I hope that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a policy speech this Sunday, makes historic recognition an axiomatic part of any peace agreement, and that Mr. Obama backs him up. This would turn Mr. Obama’s speech in Cairo into a huge leap forward in the quest for peace and understanding in the region.

Mr. Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA, is president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, founded in memory of his son to promote cross-cultural understanding.

——————–

The line connecting these news is, as it is our long term belief - the lack of a US posture when it comes to a call to get off the addiction to cheap oil that in order to obtain it, from what once was a US high handed Middle East policy, it has become now a potentates-subservient US foreign policy.

The US went to war in Iraq in order to get a more dependable source of oil and found out that it is not easy. Now the new Administration is saying much that is correct, but does it have the full backing of the American people to also utter those words that it did not say yet? The likes of “let us make the alternatives to oil cheap by taxing the oil and using ourselves those funds to commercialize the alternatives, and let us tell the Arab people those chapters of history that they do not want to hear so there can be a leveling effect on the Mideast infighting - albeit, also allowing a chance for the most westernized Arabs - the Palestinians?”  We have long said that most so called West Bank settlements will have to go, but we do not believe for a moment that this will happen a moment earlier then it will become possible by having the Saudi King state in flowery Arabic, and plain English - the Israelis have a historic right to live in our midst as an independent, separate, historic and contemporary, Jewish State with which we will live in peace-because it is their fulll right to be here. We - the Arabs of the presently oil exporting states will work together with the Israelis to create a new Middle East that has diversified away from oil, and has the full honest intention to benefit all people of the region, and the world at large, to live in a post-fossil carbon economy that benefits future generations and not just our own pockets.

But also, according to further articles on The Wall Street Journal News Page, looking at the elections in Lebanon they say “Saudi Arabia’s Renewed Political Influence Counters Tehran,” and “In Iran Vote, a Challenger Looks to Past - Reformist Candidate Borrows From Playbooks of Obama and the 1979 Islamic Revolution - ‘The Army Is Beautiful in Green’” does little else then show the WSJ love affair with oil.

The fact that Hezbollah has the stronger army in Lebanon has not changed with the election, and the fact that Israel sees little difference in the status of Lebanon as long as that Hezbollah army continues to be tolerated presents no great hope for change when in Iran there will continue an army in Green Shiia fatigues and as long as Syria was not bent under Saudi leadership to a joint agreement between the two that results in a clear understanding - in public - that Israel is there to stay for the long term, and the world is allowed to slip away from the tyranny of oil.

Sorry - but this is interconnected indeed.

 

Oil Lobby Wins Big Concession with Minor Edit to Climate Bill.

By Steven Mufson, WashPost, June 5, 2009. “During the final days of the drafting of a 946-page climate bill, Rep. Gene Green (D-Tex.) won support for an amendment that deleted a single word and inserted two others. The words could be worth millions of dollars to U.S. oil refiners. The Green amendment deleted the word ’sources’ and inserted ‘emission points.’ In the arcane world of climate legislation, that tiny bit of editing might one day give petroleum refiners valuable rights to emit carbon dioxide when it otherwise might not have been allowed.

Refiners could get the extra allowances in return for cutting carbon emissions by 50% at a single point of a vast refinery complex instead of slashing emissions by 50% for the entire facility. The tweak was just one of many in a complex cap-and-trade bill designed to limit U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.”

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con…

———–

Inhofe’s Plan: Stall Climate Action Until the Next President.

By Kate Shepard, Grist, June 4, 2009. “The Heartland Institute, an outpost for climate change skeptics, is holding its Third International Conference on Climate Change here in Washington, D.C., this week. {The First was held March 2008 in New York City, the Second in March 2009 in New York City, now the Third, or Second for 2009, is the First in Washington DC. Seemingly they get more frequent as there might indeed be some move on climate change legislation and the oil folks get in ultra-high gear! We participated at the first two, and at the Cato Institute meeting this year as well.}

Yesterday the meeting played host to the Senate’s top climate-change denier, Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe. Inhofe, best known for calling global warming  - ‘he greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people’ - regaled the crowd with his plans to obstruct climate and energy legislation in Congress this year. His pledge? That Republican deniers will ’stall that until we get a new president.’”

 http://www.grist.org/article/2009-06-04-…

 http://www.heartland.org/events/Washingt…

What Does Climate Change Do to Our Heads?     

by Sanjay Khanna
14 May 2009, CultureChange.org
A small yet growing body of evidence suggests that how people think and feel is being influenced strongly by ecosystem transformation related to climate change and industry-related displacement from the land. These powerful stressors are occurring more frequently around the world.

A case in point: When researchers from the Centre for Rural and Remote Mental Health at the University of Newcastle in Australia conducted interviews in drought-affected communities in New South Wales in 2005, the responses suggested some of their subjects may have been suffering from a recently described psychological condition called solastalgia (pronounced so-la-stal-juh).

Solastalgia describes a palpable sense of dislocation and loss that people feel when they perceive changes to their local environment as harmful. It’s a neologism that Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher at the University of Newcastle’s School of Environmental and Life Sciences, created in 2003.

Albrecht’s work among communities distraught by black-coal strip mining in New South Wales’ Upper Hunter Region convinced him that the English language needed a new term to connect the experience of ecosystem loss to mental health concerns.

“The sense of a home landscape being violated [by strip mining-related environmental damage] seemed to have disturbed the region’s social ecology so much that the psychic or mental health of many people living in the zone of high impact was being affected,” he says.

Albrecht’s stunning insight? That there might be a wide variety of shifts in the health of an ecosystem—from subtle landscape changes related to global warming to desolate wastelands created by large-scale strip mining—that diminish people’s mental health.

In Eastern Australian communities, where the toll of a six-year-long drought has been devastating, interviews with farmers provided additional momentum for the solastalgia concept.

In one such interview, a female farmer poignantly described the loss of her garden oasis. “Our gardens have had to die,” she said, “because our house dam has been dry…. So it’s very depressing for a woman because a garden is an oasis out here with this dust…you know, to come home to a nice green lawn is just… that’s all gone, so you’ve got dust at your back door.”

While persistent drought and open-pit coal mining may be extreme cases, if the environmental degradation of the past hundred years is any indication, our contemporary lifestyles, built on a dwindling resource base, have failed to acknowledge how much the mental health of people and ecosystems is interrelated.

This may imply that the unrelenting media focus on weather-related and economic aspects of climate change does not adequately take into consideration the challenge of mitigating the psychological impact of global warming. How might we feel when the heat is relentless and our surrounding environment changes irrevocably? How might our mental health be affected?

In a recent Wired magazine article on Albrecht and the concept of solastalgia, Global Mourning: How the next victim of climate change will be our minds, writer Clive Thompson sensitively characterized as “global mourning” the potential impact of overwhelming environmental transformation caused by climate change. Thompson cogently summed up Albrecht’s view of what solastalgia might look like were it to become an epidemic of emotional and psychic instability causally linked to changing climates and ecosystems.

Albrecht also emphasizes that feelings of melancholia and homesickness have previously been recorded among Aboriginal peoples in the Americas and Australia who were forcibly moved from their home territories by U.S., Canadian and Australian governments in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Sanjay Khanna: You speak of psychoterratic and somaterratic illnesses. What are they?

Glenn Albrecht: Psychoterratic illness involves the psyche or mind and terra or earth. So a psychoterratic illness would be an earth-related mental illness, where both nostalgia and solastalgia are examples of people being made “mentally ill” by the severing of “healthy” links between themselves and their home or territory.

Somaterratic illness, on the other hand, involves soma or the body and relates to damage done to the human body, its physiology and/or genetics, as a result of the loss of ecosystem health by, for example, toxic pollution in any given area of land.

SK: You note on your blog that there are antecedents to solastalgia.

GA: Yes, David Rapport, a past professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, is a pioneer in the study of the health of natural ecosystems and their relationship with humans. In the 1970s, he described “ecosystem distress syndrome,” which was what happened when an ecosystem couldn’t restore its balance after an external disturbance.

Once I fully appreciated this concept, I realized there must be a human equivalent to ecosystem distress syndrome, that is, a home environment so profoundly disturbed that it affected the balance of well being or the mental health of people within their social ecology.

The interviews of affected people I conducted along with Nick Higginbotham and Linda Connor in strip-mined areas of the Upper Hunter Valley showed that people’s sense of place was being violated and that this was profoundly disturbing them. Their home environment was being desolated and it seemed to us that the vital link between ecosystem health and human health, both physical and mental, was being severed.

SK: Can you tell us a little bit more about the origins of solastalgia?

GA: Solastalgia’s Latin roots combine three ideas: The solace that one’s environment provides, the desolation caused by that environment’s degradation and the pain or distress that occurs inside a person as a result.

Solastalgia brings into English a much-needed word that links a mental state to a state of the biophysical environment. The need for new concepts in the face of what is happening under climate change has seen other cultures develop new terms that have affinities with solastalgia.

The Inuit, for example, have a new word, uggianaqtuq (pronounced OOG-gi-a-nak-took), which relates to climate change and has connotations of the weather as a once reliable and trusted friend that is now acting strangely or unpredictably. And the Portuguese use the word saudade to describe a feeling one has for a loved one who is absent or has disappeared. The upshot is that under the pressure of climate change, your preferred climate and ecosystem might well be thought of as a lover gone missing or turned bad.

SK: How might your research impact on psychiatry and the diagnosis of psychoterratic illnesses such as solastalgia?

GA: Alongside five other researchers, our four-person team co-wrote a summary of our research on the mental health impacts of mining and drought for psychological and psychiatric professionals. The paper, Solastalgia: the distress caused by climate change, was published in Australasian Psychiatry, a publication of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, in November 2007.

Our team has mused that people badly affected by solastalgia would benefit from a set of professionally developed diagnostic tools so that solastalgia could be listed as a condition that required diagnosis and professional attention.

We’re happy for other people to take that challenge up and there are some academic psychiatrists who are interested in exploring these ideas further. However, given that key aspects of solastalgia are existential, the traditions of environmental philosophy and medical psychiatry may not come together so harmoniously. The melancholia of solastalgia is not the same as clinical depression, but it may well be a precursor to serious psychic disturbance.

That said, it’s worth remembering that up until the mid-twentieth century, the medical profession viewed nostalgia as a diagnosable psycho-physiological illness in which, for example, soldiers fighting in foreign lands became so homesick and melancholic it could kill them.

Today psychiatrists would see the condition of rapid and unwelcome severing from home as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an outcome of an acute stressor such as warfare or a Hurricane Katrina.

Solastalgia on the other hand is most often the result of chronic environmental stress; it is the lived experience of gradually losing the solace a once stable home environment provided. It is therefore appropriate to diagnose solastalgia in the face of slow and insidious forces such as climate change or mining.

SK: Would you tell us a little bit about the transdisciplinary team that you participate on?

GA: Nick Higginbotham, a social psychologist colleague who specializes in epidemiology and health matters, is working to gather empirical data for our solastalgia research. He has developed a much-needed environmental distress scale (EDS) that teases out the specific environmental components of distress from all the other things that go on in a person’s life. We will be using this scale in the new AUS$430K grant the team has received from the Australian Research Council to extend our earlier work by addressing “the lived experience (ethnography) of climate change” among people in the Hunter Valley.

Linda Connor, an ethnographer and social and medical anthropologist, handles the ethnography or cultural experience of all this. So collectively we have empirical (Higginbotham), cultural (Connor) and philosophical (me) interpretations of health and climate change. Finally, Sonia Freeman, our research assistant, has co-authored a number of papers.

SK: What implications might the recent apology by Kevin Rudd, the new Prime Minister of Australia, to the “stolen generations” of Australian Aborigines have in relation to solastalgia?

GA: The apology by Kevin Rudd to the stolen generations is about seeking forgiveness for the government-sanctioned taking of Indigenous children from their families and from their home territories (their “country”) from 1909 until 1969. There have been profound mental and physical health impacts from this process and many of the remaining stolen generations are now ageing but with a 17-year shorter life expectancy on average than non-indigenous Australians. Those who are alive today may be experiencing genuine nostalgia for a once-sustainable past and solastalgia within contemporary pathological and depressed home environments.

SK: Do you see a relationship between the conquest of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, the state of environmental degradation and the experience of loss that we are seeing today? If so, what is that relationship from your perspective and research?

GA: The answer is, yes, there is a relationship between the two colonial cultures: the two continents were colonized only by the systematic dispossession of complex and formerly sustainable Indigenous societies.

Traditional Indigenous cultures in the Americas and Australasia displayed a profound appreciation of the relationship between human and ecosystem health, something global culture is trying to rediscover under the label of sustainability.

Remnant aboriginal cultures are still being pushed aside by the dominant global model of economic growth and progress. Even today, their chronic health problems are likely related to social and political issues that are connected to ongoing dispossession.

I’ve had recent firsthand experience of the lives of Indigenous people leading semi-traditional lives in Northern Australia to see the importance of the connections between human health and ecosystem health. In Arnhem Land, Aborigines who live on what are called “outstations” have been able to maintain much stronger and healthier links to their traditional land. Their physical and mental health status is, as a consequence, much better than those whose links to their own land have been severed and who now live in crowded, dysfunctional communities.

SK: Some of the solastalgia symptoms you describe are similar to the loss of cultural identity, including the loss of language and ancestral memory. Loss of place seems an extension of this new global experience of weakened cultural identities and Earth-based ethical moorings.

GA: I have written on this topic in a professional academic journal and expressed the idea of having an Earth-based ethical framework that could contribute to maximizing the creative potential of human cultural and technological complexity and diversity without destroying the foundational complexity and diversity of natural systems in the process.

Our history shows that some people and cultures have a tendency to create pathological ways of thinking, but if we want to support a life-affirming ethic in the twenty-first century, we are in need of reform and change.

SK: In the context of accelerating environmental change, what would you say to young people about the planet they are inheriting? What does sustainability mean in the context of the overwhelming pace of environmental and economic change that we’re seeing today?

GA: This is a tough one because the children of today face the double whammy of the escalating pace and scale of changes under the global forces of development and those of climate chaos. I’ve suggested to my own teenagers that what is happening is unacceptable ethically and practically and they should be in a state of advanced revolt about the whole deal.

From my perspective, supporting and maintaining the status quo is no longer a reasonable response to these big picture issues. At every point, we must challenge and refute this kind of thinking in a society that is clearly on a non-sustainable pathway.

Unfortunately, the lot in life of the youth today is to undo much of what has been done in the name of growth and progress in the last two hundred years. However, this does not mean a return to the past: As Herman Daly (the ecological economist) once said, you can have an economy that develops without growing.

On a personal level, I’m an optimistic, energetic philosopher and I believe that we must get our values more life orientated. I’m not willing to give up on encouraging change towards sustainability even in the face of what look like overwhelming negative forces.

The four-year grant recently awarded to our team will allow us to study the lived experience of climate change at a regional level. We’re happy that we’ll be able to start contributing data on how climate change is shifting culture, values and attitudes.

The next four years are critical. As a member of a research team, I believe that we’re right at the leading edge of change research and we are very committed to supporting the network of ecological and social relationships that promote human health. There’s hope in recognizing solastalgia and defeating it by creating ways to reconnect with our local environment and communities.

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Sanjay Khanna is a writer and foresight researcher based in Vancouver, Canada. He can be reached at sk AT khannaresearch DOT com. His blog is at www.realisticsanctuary.com. More articles are available at www.huffingtonpost.com

After Cairo, It’s Clinton Time - It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry after reading the reactions of analysts and officials in the Middle East to President Obama’s Cairo speech. “It’s not what he says, but what he does,” many said. No, ladies and gentlemen of the Middle East, it is what he says and what you do and what we do. We must help, but we can’t want democracy or peace more than you do.

Thomas L. Friedman, A New York Times Op-Ed Column, June 6, 2009

What should we be doing? The follow-up to the president’s speech will have to be led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This will be her first big test, and, for me, there is no question as to where she should be putting all her energy: on the peace process.

No, not that peace process — not the one between Israelis and Palestinians. That one’s probably beyond diplomacy. No, I’m talking about the peace process that is much more strategically important — the one inside Iraq.

The most valuable thing that Mrs. Clinton could do right now is to spearhead a sustained effort — along with the U.N., the European Union and Iraq’s neighbors — to resolve the lingering disputes between Iraqi factions before we complete our withdrawal. (We’ll be out of Iraq’s cities by June 30 and the whole country by the close of 2011.)

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Why? Because if Iraq unravels as we draw down, the Obama team will be blamed, and it will be a huge mess. By contrast, if a decent and stable political order can take hold in Iraq, it could have an extremely positive impact on the future of the Arab world and on America’s reputation.

I have never bought the argument that Iraq was the bad war, Afghanistan the good war and Pakistan the necessary war. Folks, they’re all one war with different fronts. It’s a war within the Arab-Muslim world between progressive and anti-modernist forces over how this faith community is going to adapt to modernity — modern education, consensual politics, the balance between religion and state and the rights of women. Any decent outcome in Iraq would bolster all the progressive forces by creating an example of something that does not exist in the Middle East today — an independent, democratizing Arab-Muslim state.

“The reason there are no successful Arab democracies today is because there is no successful Arab democracy today,” said Stanford’s Larry Diamond, the author of “The Spirit of Democracy.” “When there is no model, it is hard for an idea to diffuse in a region.”

Rightly or wrongly, we stepped into the middle of this war of ideas in the Arab-Muslim world in 2003 when we decapitated the Iraqi regime, wiped away its authoritarian political structure and went about clumsily midwifing something that the modern Arab world has never seen before — a horizontal dialogue between the constituent communities of an Arab state. In Iraq’s case, that is primarily Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

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Yes, in a region that has only known top-down monologues from kings, dictators and colonial powers, we have helped Iraqis convene the first horizontal dialogue to write their own social contract for how to share power.

At first, this dialogue took place primarily through violence. Liberated from Saddam’s iron fist, each Iraqi community tested its strength against the others, saying in effect: “Show me what you got, baby.” The violence was horrific and ultimately exhausting for all. So now we’ve entered a period of negotiations over how Iraq will be governed. But it’s unfinished and violence could easily return.

And that brings me to Secretary Clinton. I do not believe the argument that Iraqis will not allow us to help mediate their disputes — whether over Kirkuk, oil-sharing or federalism. For years now, our president, secretary of state and secretary of defense have flown into Iraq, met the leaders for a few hours and then flown away, not to return for months. We need a more serious, weighty effort. Hate the war, hate Bush, but don’t hate the idea of trying our best to finish this right.

This is important {that is the building of a modern Iraqi State!}. Afghanistan is secondary. Baghdad is a great Arab and Muslim capital. Iraq has something no other Arab country has in abundance: water, oil and an educated population. It already has sprouted scores of newspapers and TV stations that operate freely. “Afghanistan will never have any impact outside of Afghanistan. Iraq can change minds,” said Mamoun Fandy, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

You demonstrate that Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds can write their own social contract, and you will tell the whole Arab world that there is a model other than top-down monologues from iron-fisted dictators. You will expose the phony democracy in Iran, and you will leave a legacy for America that will help counter Abu Ghraib and torture.

Ultimately, which way Iraq goes will depend on whether its elites decide to use their freedom to loot their country or to rebuild it. That’s still unclear. But we still have a chance to push things there in the right direction, and a huge interest in doing so. Mrs. Clinton is a serious person; this is a serious job. I hope she does it.

—————-

We thought this was a terrific article - indeed it might be the most realistic article showing the path that the US can take in Iraq - a true effort to get the Iraqis to see that if they stick together all of them could turn into winners - this without further bloodshed. Now, to the rest of the Middle East, with the existing governments, the US does not have indeed real leverage, whatever we might have thought on this before the speech. OK - so the speech shows the way, and the kings and dictators must come up with first steps that then Israel can be asked to reciprocate. No! No! and No! begets a simple No! and there is no move from the present dead point.

Then, being Sunday, we watched to see who will pick up the Friedman article among the Sunday TV pundits - and you know what - nobody.

Only Fareed Zakharia, without mentioning Thomas Friedman said that the one place where the US has now real influence - Iraq - was deemphasized in the Cairo speech, like Iran was not emphasized beyond the regional nuclear impact. That was it - one remark in the GPS/CNN program and nobody picked it up!

All programs belabored the Palestinian/Israeli settlements problem, and some - that is the Republican pundits - said that Obama bowed his head before the Muslim World while forgeting the one friend the US has in the region - Israel. Then, the foreigners on the programs, even when presented as disenters in their countries, ganged up on Israel i.e. they would want to see a denuclearized Middle East - that is a denuclearized Israel as well. The Israeli on that program just smiled.

——————–

on the other hand, Anne Bayefsky, of National Review online of today, among many things we disagree with, had also something that must give us a pose to think. She writes:

- In the name of “freedom of religion” he {that is President Obama} chose to “welcome efforts like Saudi Arabian King Abdullah’s interfaith dialogue.” The Saudi Arabian government criminalizes the public practice of any religion but Islam.

This manufactured human-rights fantasy has done a tremendous disservice to the oppressed across the Arab and Muslim world.

EU turns blind eye to corruption in eastern gas trade
Andrew Rettman, The EUobserver, June 6, 2006

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The EU is sending a “fact-finding” mission to Ukraine to see if its financial troubles could lead to a new gas crisis. But it is wary of tackling deeper problems of politics and corruption in the eastern gas trade, which also threaten EU energy security. The team of senior European Commission officials will travel to Kiev “in the coming days” and produce a report in time for a regular summit of EU leaders in Brussels on 18 June.


The move comes after Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said that Ukraine is unable to pay for Russian gas and will probably start stealing EU-bound transit volumes, unless the EU loans it billions of euros.

Ukraine’s state-owned gas distributor, Naftogaz, has poor cashflow and often avoids public audits. But Ukraine sees the Putin statements as part of a propaganda war to damage its reputation and increase political support for new Russian pipelines bypassing the country. The dispute over Naftogaz’ reliability is just one aspect of a major shake-up in the Russia-Ukraine gas business.

Mr Putin and Ukraine Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko are at the same time trying to strong-arm Ukraine gas tycoon Dmitry Firtash, in developments which highlight the links between politics, gas and organised crime in the region.

A Putin-Tymoshenko deal in January ended the role of RosUkrEnergo (RUE), in which Mr Firtash controls a 50 percent stake, in selling Turkmenistan gas to Ukraine. Naftogaz in March also seized €3 billion of RUE gas stocks.

A little-known, Swiss-based firm called RosGas in May took ownership of Mr Firtash’s Hungarian gas supply company, Emfesz, in a transaction that Mr Firtash has called “illegal” and is fighting in the Swiss courts. It is unclear who owns RosGas. But Emfesz has said it belongs to the Putin-controlled Russian firm Gazprom.

The events have already affected European interests. RUE’s problems have seen it cut deliveries to EU states Poland and Hungary. The Emfesz takeover means 20 percent of Hungary’s gas supply is now in unknown hands.

The Putin-Tymoshenko attack on Mr Firtash could be designed to hurt Ukraine’s pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko, and reformist presidential candidate, Arsenyi Yatsenyuk. Mr Firtash is widely reported to have given financial support to Mr Yushchenko. The Firtash-linked TV station, Inter, has given Mr Yatsenyuk lots of good publicity.

The gas shake-up may have begun back in May 2008 with Moscow’s arrest on tax fraud charges of alleged mafia boss Semion Mogilevich.

Mr Mogilevich is connected to big names in the gas trade. In one example, his lawyer and ex-wife were involved in two Firtash companies. Mogilevich associates have also worked with Oleg Palchykov, a friend of Mr Firtash and a former co-director of RUE together with Konstantin Chuichenko, now a senior aide of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Analysts, such as Roman Kupchinsky from the US-based NGO Jamestown, believe that Mr Mogilevich helped Mr Firtash get started in the gas trade and used to give him protection. One way of looking at the Russia-Ukraine gas wars is not in terms of international commerce or geopolitics, but of one criminal clan muscling in on its rival.

“People can see that Firtash is a dead fish, so they are taking little bites out of him,” one Brussels-based diplomat said on the Emfesz takeover.

See no evil, hear no evil

Mr Firtash, who denies having any business relations with Mr Mogilevich or paying Mr Yushchenko, is trying to engage EU support.

One of Mr Firtash’s employees, Robert Shetler-Jones, last year donated around €57,000 to the British Conservative party.

Mr Firtash’s small, Brussels-based public affairs firm, Macmillan, compares him to “Mazeppa” - a seventeenth century Ukrainian patriot betrayed by a fellow nobleman and forced to flee the country, leading to decades of domination by Russia.

A middleman claiming to represent Mr Firtash has also approached the Brussels offices of two large international PR firms in recent weeks.

The European Commission has so far turned a deaf ear. In March, EU officials said they were “closely monitoring” Naftogaz’ seizure of RUE’s gas - “closely monitoring” is a typical commission “holding statement” when it does not have a real position.

The June fact-finding mission will not ask questions about Emfesz.

“From our point of view, the takeover of Emfesz has to be done in full respect of internal market rules. If there is any suspicion this is not the case, there should be a notification by one of the parties. At this stage we have not received any such notification,” a commission spokesman said.

———–

Concrete steps:

UK-based NGO Global Witness, which is no fan of Mr Firtash, in March wrote to commission president Jose Manuel Barroso urging him to root out corruption in the sector by forcing all energy companies active in the EU to disclose their ownership structure and any payments they make to governments.

A director from the commission’s energy department, Marjeta Jager, replied to say that the issue is being taken care of by the EU’s “political support” for the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI).

The EITI, a global project launched in 2002 by former UK leader Tony Blair, so far counts just one country, Azerbaijan, as fully compliant with its charter.

“The European Commission has failed to recognise the danger these companies [RUE, RosGas or other alleged Gazprom offshoots] present to the energy security of the EU and has not made any attempt to convince member states to investigate the role these companies play in the supply chain,” Jamestown’s Mr Kupchinsky s

From IISD a Special Report on UNCCD Land Day at the ongoing Bonn meetings on Climate Change.

On Saturday June 6, 2009, organized by the UNCCD Secretariat, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) Secretariat hosted “Land Day” at the Gustav-Stresemann-Institut, Bonn, Germany.

The event, attended by 170 participants, aimed to help climate change negotiators and other stakeholders attending the concurrent Bonn climate change talks consider in detail the linkages between climate change and desertification, land degradation and drought (DLDD).

The event was opened by Luc Gnacadja, UNCCD Executive Secretary, Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC Executive Secretary, and Adolf Kloke-Lesch, Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) Director-General.

Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute Director, Columbia University, offered a pre-recorded keynote address.

Participants then attended three panels, entitled:

  - “How does sustainable land management support climate change adaptation?”;

 - “What options can soil carbon sequestration offer for mitigating and adapting to climate change?”; and

  - “Sustainable land management in climate change policy frameworks: what is the way forward?”

Luc Gnacadja, UNCCD Executive Secretary, stressed that land has an unparalleled capacity to sequester carbon, but its potential to mitigate climate change is presently untapped. Emphasizing that numerous opportunities exist to include land within a post-2012 climate regime, he said the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and carbon markets must be changed and made accessible to farmers and land managers.

Gnacadja argued that soil restoration and soil carbon sequestration offer “win-win-win” opportunities for climate change, biodiversity and desertification. Noting that “poor soils lead to poor people,” he further suggested that inclusion of desertification, land degradation and drought in a future climate regime has the potential to bring more equity and justice to developing countries.

Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC Executive Secretary, discussed the linkages between the agriculture and forest sectors and climate change mitigation and adaptation. He highlighted that 10-12% of total annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from agricultural practices, and that deforestation accounted for 20% of GHG emissions in the 1990s.

Underscoring that some mitigation options can be realized at “low or even negative costs,” de Boer highlighted a number of possibilities in these sectors, including: reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries (REDD); improved crop and grazing management; and restoration of organic soils. He added that mitigation options, such as agroforestry, support adaptation and promote biodiversity.

Adolf Kloke-Lesch, Director-General, German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), said climate change threatens to destroy the efforts and achievements of sustainable development. Noting that land degradation was previously considered a collection of local problems, he argued that today it is understood as a global problem that must be part of the global environmental agenda.

Kloke-Lesch stated that sustainable land management offers a cost-effective solution to mitigating climate change and that natural infrastructures, such as forests and soils, must be part of this solution. He stressed that sustainable land management must become an integral part of climate protection strategies in a new “Green Deal” forged at the 2009 climate change talks in Copenhagen.

In a pre-recorded message, Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute, Columbia University, underscored the importance of integrating the urgent agendas of drylands and global climate change. He said drylands are amongst the most vulnerable areas to climate change, and that impacts in dryland countries are compounded because these countries are also experiencing demographic pressures and have large populations living in poverty.

Sachs explained that the combination of these factors is “at the root” of some of the greatest security challenges on the planet, noting these issues must be addressed to lessen security risks not only for the people in these regions but for the entire world.

He called for several responses, including: better science on the effects of climate change in dryland regions; increased understanding of human systems, such as the impacts of climate change on herders’ livestock assets; and increased understanding of intervention measures that are needed for adaptation and climate change preparedness. Sachs emphasized the need for a holistic approach in addressing these issues, highlighting the potential for ecosystem-based adaption in this regard.

————

(later addition) Professor Sachs - Highlighting the political conflicts in the 10,000 km stretch of drylands across the Sahel from Senegal to the Horn of Africa, across the Red Sea into Yemen, Pakistan and on to Afghanistan, Sachs said the lack of  “a coherent, consistent, persistent, scaled science-based response” to the harrowing effects of climate change associated with hunger, livestock survival and increasing stresses between sedentary populations and nomadic or semi-nomadic herders is the real challenge.

It is mind-boggling how above reality was suppressed by the UN for so many years - this as if the men in the UN glass building can speak only of unsolvable issues that provide for them a raison d’etre and their jobs, while trying to find the real reasons of those conflicts, the reasons before the fabricated reasons of “the other” would do harm to the bureacrats self  interest.

—————-

www.sustainabilitank.info is still waiting to hear above ideas fully backed by the UN bureaucracy, but we are already gratified that many individuals, and enlightened governments, speak out forcefully. We were privvy, and victims, to a UN that was hiding above under the global rug because they felt it was just one more cause that can harm the sale of petroleum.

Please also read into the “at the root” comment by Dr. Sachs, locations like Darfur and the Middle East, and we would like to remark that we were hoping that President Obama would mention this in his Cairo speech to the Muslim World - but he did not. In our opinion, an opinion we fought for at the UN, a cooperative program on these “Land” issues between Israel, the Arab World, Iran, China, Africa, with international support, could go a long way in helping  address some of the problems with the Islamic governments - problems that were mentioned in the speech and the African problems that were not mentioned at all.

Juan Somavia is Director-General of the International Labour Office, at the UN ILO - International Labor Organization since 1999, prior to that he was Permanent Representative of Chile to the United Nations in New York from March 1990 to March 1999 - thus within the UN international system for at least 20 years. When it comes to change, he is thus very slow. Unexpectedly, he steps now into the climate change challenge, at a time that most at the UN have taken notice of this topic.

Adaptation to climate change poses a huge challenge - by Juan Somavia -   On the occasion of World Environment Day , 5 June 2009.

The global financial and economic crisis is prompting us to rethink values, policies and practices that have led to a global jobs crisis, increasing poverty and inequalities, and a widespread disregard for the environment.

We ignore the mounting costs of energy-intensive production and consumption patterns and the threats posed by climate change at our peril. Achieving a high-employment low-carbon economy must become a top priority in moving towards a more sustainable development path.

Green jobs that contribute to preserving or restoring the environment are being created directly and indirectly. Equally important, though less visible, green jobs can help to make the whole economy more environmentally friendly. Adjusting production and consumption patterns to low-carbon and green economies is a global challenge affecting enterprises and workplaces everywhere.

Similarly, adaptation to climate change poses a huge challenge, particularly for those developing countries which did little to cause the problem but now are likely to suffer most.

In December this year, the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference offers an opportunity to make a major step forward if an ambitious new agreement is reached which takes due account of all pillars of sustainable development - economic, social and environmental.

The Green Jobs Initiative sponsored jointly by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the ILO, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Organisation of Employers (IOE), has highlighted the promise of a triple dividend from green jobs: sustainable enterprises; poverty reduction; and a job-centred economic recovery (1).

Meeting the dual challenges of the economic crisis and of climate change hinges on adjusting existing jobs and workplaces and on investing in new technologies generating new sources of growth, enterprise creation and jobs. Green jobs are a practicable and effective option for reviving economies and for quickly creating large numbers of jobs (2). Similarly, investment in adapting to climate change could provide many new jobs, particularly for lowincome
persons.

The ILO is working together with UNEP and other multilateral partners in a “Green Economy Initiative” adopted by the CEB (UN System Chief Executives Board for Coordination) to respond to the crisis by promoting investment in long-term environmental sustainability as part of a stimulus and recovery expenditure, and to put the world on a climate-friendly path.

It is encouraging to see that an increasing number of stimulus packages include support for the greening of economies and the creation of green jobs. But, lifting millions of workers surviving on less than US$2 per day out of poverty, calls not just for green jobs but also decent work - where the promotion of enterprise and job creation is accompanied by measures to ensure adequate incomes and social protection, support for social dialogue and respect for workers’ rights.

Wisely invested, resources for recovery could leave a legacy of energy efficient infrastructure, rehabilitated  ecosystems, renewable energy sources, and enterprises and workplaces more resilient to climate change.

And they could lay the foundation for a greener economic future which is environmentally sound, economically productive and socially sustainable.
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(1) See the Green Jobs report: http://www.unep.org/pdf/A_Global_Green_N…
(2) For a more detailed discussion, see for example, ILO: The financial and economic crisis - A decent work response; UNEP: The Green New Deal - A policy brief.

UNEP NEWS RELEASE

Three More Countries Say ‘Yes’ to Low-Carbon Future  On World Environment
Day

Ethiopia, Pakistan and Portugal join UNEP’s Climate Neutral Network

World Environment Day 2009 – Your Planet Needs You!

NAIROBI, 5 June 2009 – Three countries have pledged to promote low-carbon,
green growth by joining the Climate Neutral Network (CN Net) – an
initiative led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to
promote global action to de-carbonize our economies and societies.

Ethiopia, Pakistan and Portugal are the latest nations to join the CN Net
initiative, bringing the total number of countries that are going
low-carbon or even climate neutral to 10.  These 10 countries have a
combined population of over 266 million and cover the land area roughly the
size of Argentina or 2 percent of the world’s terrestrial surface.

The announcement was made on World Environment Day (WED) which this year is
held under the theme “Your Planet Needs YOU! Unite to Combat Climate
Change”.

While the main WED activities are taking place in this year’s host country,
Mexico, celebrations are being organized worldwide – from remote villages
to sprawling capitals – making it a truly global event.

Welcoming the new CN Net participants, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP
Executive Director Achim Steiner said:  “From setting world tree-planting
records to taking full advantage of the abundant sun, waves and winds to
promoting carbon finance investments, the three new countries joining the
Climate Neutral Network are offering diverse and innovative strategies to
combat climate change and benefit from low-carbon, green development and
growth.”

“However, these strategies will only succeed in the long-term if the
international community sends the right policy and market signals for
climate-friendly development. This year’s World Environment Day comes just
over 180 days before the UN climate convention meeting in Denmark where
Governments need to agree on a new, forward-looking climate treaty.  By
‘Sealing the Deal’ on a new climate agreement in Copenhagen, world leaders
will be delivering perhaps the most transformational and far-reaching
stimulus package of them all, now and for the coming decades”, Mr. Steiner
added.

Innovative national strategies Ethiopia is the first African country to
join the Climate Neutral Network.  While the nation is not a net
contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, it has expressed its
commitment to mitigating climate change.

Ethiopia is an active supporter of UNEP’s Billion Tree Campaign,
contributing more trees than any other nation – over 1 billion – towards
the global target of planting 7 billion trees by the crucial UN climate
change conference in December 2009..

Furthermore, through Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation, the Government
is distributing 5.4 million compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) – commonly
known as “energy savers” – country-wide to help consumers save money on
electricity bills and reduce their carbon footprint.

Pakistan is coming on board the CN Net with a vision of making the country
a destination of choice for international carbon finance investments and
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects.  Already, CDM projects ranging
from biogas co-generation to energy and fuel efficiency are being
implemented nation-wide.

The Government of Pakistan has also set the 10% target for renewable energy
by 2015 and established the Alternate Energy Development Board to spearhead
this effort.

Portugal is the first EU member State to join the Climate Neutral Network.
The country expects to generate 31% of all its energy from clean sources by
2020, including 60% of electricity; and its renewable energy plans include
the world’s largest wind, wave and solar energy facilities.

National policies to promote renewable energies include investment
subsidies, tax breaks and fixed feed-in tariffs for photovoltaic, wave
energy, small hydro, wind power, forest biomass, urban waste and biogas.

Cities, companies join CN Net The Mexican city of Aguascalientes, the
Portuguese municipality of Cascais and the Brazilian city of Niterói have
also come on board the Network.

Taking its name from the abundant hot thermal springs found in the area,
Aguascalientes has embarked on an ambitious strategy to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions, which includes upgrading cycling lanes and suburban trains,
switching public lighting to solar power and capturing methane from
landfills to produce biogas.

Cascais, a small municipality outside Lisbon, has committed to making
itself carbon neutral.  As part of this effort, 25 municipal buildings are
subject to real-time monitoring of energy flows.  Cascais will also be the
focus of a rigorous scientific study to examine how climate change may
affect water resources, coastal zones, fisheries, agriculture, human health
and impacts on tourism, energy, forestry and biodiversity.

The Brazilian municipality of Niterói is the first city in South America to
join the CN Net.  Located just across the Guanabara Bay from Rio de
Janeiro, the city has a population of 500,000.  The municipality is taking
the issue of climate change as a priority and has set targets in the areas
of transport, energy and waste.

In addition, two high-tech giants – Dell and Cable & Wireless – are among
the new private sector companies joining the CN Net with plans to green the
ICT sector, which accounts for roughly 2 percent of the global greenhouse
gas (GHG) emissions and has a significant potential to use ICT solutions to
reduce GHG emissions from other sectors.

——–

About World Environment Day 2009 World Environment Day, commemorated each
year on 5 June, is one of the principal vehicles through which the United
Nations stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and enhances
political attention and action.  The theme for WED 2009 is “Your Planet
Needs You! UNite to Combat Climate Change”. It reflects the urgency for
nations to agree on a new deal at the crucial climate convention meeting in
Copenhagen some 190 days later in the year, and the links with overcoming
poverty and improved management of forests.

About Climate Neutral Network
Launched in February 2008, the Climate Neutral Network (CN Net) is a
high-profile outreach initiative led by the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP) to catalyze global transition to low-carbon economies and
societies.  Today, the CN Net counts close to 150 participants, including
10 countries, 12 cities, major international companies, UN agencies and
leading NGOs who have set the most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction
targets in the world. Based on a free of charge, interactive website, the
CN Net gives participants a platform to present their strategies in climate
neutrality to the world, providing visibility and inspiration to others. It
functions as a network for information exchange and sharing of practical
experiences, making the best available knowledge on climate neutrality
widely available to all. CN Net participants are already achieving
significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. As the Network grows and
expands, so will its contribution to global efforts to combat climate
change.  http://www.unep.org/climateneutral

For more information, please contact:

Nick Nuttall, UNEP Spokesperson and Head of Media, on Tel: +254-20-7623084,
Mobile: +254-733-632755, or when traveling: +41-79-596-5737, or e-mail:
 nick.nuttall at unep.org

Or: Xenya Cherny Scanlon, Information Officer, UNEP Climate Neutral
Network, on Tel: +254-20-762-4387, Mobile: +254-721-847-563, or e-mail:
 xenya.scanlon at unep.org internet: http://www.unep.org/climateneutral

*********************************
Jim Sniffen
Programme Officer
UN Environment Programme
New York
tel: +1-212-963-8094/8210
 info at nyo.unep.org
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Posted in Policy Lessons from Mad Cow Disease, Reporting From the UN Headquarters in New York, Global Warming issues, Real World's News, Green is Possible, Futurism, Ethiopia, Portugal, Nairobi

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