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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China ‘to block’ Hummer takeover

Hummer had thrived from its military image and demand for large cars.

A Chinese firm’s bid to buy the gas-guzzling Hummer car brand will be blocked on environmental grounds, according to Chinese state radio.
Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery emerged as the surprise buyer for the brand earlier this year. But China National Radio said Hummer is at odds with the country’s planning agency’s attempts to decrease pollution from Chinese manufacturers. But Sichuan Tengzhong disputed the accuracy of the radio report.
“The fact that it is from an article from a state media organisation does not mean it is government policy,” the company said in a statement. “Some people may have views and speculation, but the Chinese government has a process that we respect.”

The acquisition from General Motors needs Chinese regulatory approval.

‘Lacks expertise’
The value of the bid was not disclosed at the time, but analysts say that GM would have made about $100m (£61m) from the sale.

National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) will also block Sichuan Tengzhong from buying Hummer because the Chinese construction equipment maker lacks expertise in car production, the state radio added.
Sichuan Tengzhong said: “The view expressed on China National Radio’s website did not quote or source anyone at NDRC.”
“We do not yet have a definitive agreement, but are developing our proposals with GM and Hummer and we will continue to engage with the appropriate authorities in an appropriate manner.”
Hummers were originally built as military off-road vehicles by a company called AM General.
GM bought the Hummer brand in 1999.
The brand took off as US consumers flocked to large cars and sport utility vehicles and were favoured by celebrities including Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But sales have suffered as the military image has become less popular and petrol prices surged.
Hummers weigh up to five tons and have fuel consumption of around 15 miles per gallon.
The sale of Hummer, known as “Han Ma” or Bold Horse in China, has been part of GM’s plan to reinvent itself by concentrating on fewer brands.

Prominent in the program is: Professor Susan Shirk - an expert on Chinese politics and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Clinton administration. She was in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs (People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia). She is currently a professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is married to Samuel L. Popkin, another prominent UCSD professor.

For background, see article

1. EUROPE: Decolonising the Arctic
2. Nearly independent day 
3. Greenland gives Denmark the cold shoulder. But would it ever be viable as a country?
4. Jun 20th 2009 Web only
6. BRITAIN: Tax havens under pressure
7. Whiter than white 
8. Britain’s offshore financial centres race for respectability
9. Jun 18th 2009

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.

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!

—————–

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.

————-

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.

———–

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.

 Former President Bill Clinton, who earlier this week shared the podium with UNSG Ban Ki-moon at the UN, when the latter appointed him as his representative for Haiti, was scheduled to share with him also the dinner table, podium, and the “GLOBAL HUMANITARIAN AWARD of THE FOREIGN POLICY ASSOCIATION at its 2009 Global Philanthropy Awards Dinner, Wednesday, June 17th, 2009, at the St. Regis Roof Ballroom, Midtown Manhattan.

Considering that all at the UN seem to believe that Mr. Ban Ki-moon has actually started already his re-election campaign, at a time he is very much under criticism for the very low key ways he handles important issues that end up in his lap - this as his main focus seems to be on the dictum “do not offend” when this applies to the main powers that will decide on his reelection. He makes statements that are not intended to lead to results, and some actually even question sometimes the veracity of what was said - this is unforgivable.

We looked at all of this and concluded, these last days, that Bill Clinton was ill advice at cooperating with the UNSG if he is simply used as a way to collect IOUs from the US Administration to be used later in the re-election campaign.

We wrote about this at: http://www.sustainabilitank.info/?s=Ban+…

Thinking about the FPA event, further, these days of Washington’s involvement in Climate Change, sharing the podium also with the CEO of the Italian oil company - ENI - who was getting the FPA’s Corporate Social Responsibility Award - might also not have been the greatest idea either.

Last night I went to St. Regis, saw the Sri Lankan Tamils demonstrating across the street and asking where was Ban Ki-moon when 30, 000 of their people were being killed? Why does he get that Humanitarian Award? They would rather see him go home.

Upstairs, at the dinner table, I saw Mr. Ban Ki-moon, but could not find Mr. Clinton.

Then, when the speaking part started we were informed that Bill Clinton is a no-show. We were told that he could not come because of an emergency in the family - but we were not told what happened. The quiet of the announcement took me back, and I must confess that my feeling was that we were not told the whole truth and secretly I was hoping that Mr. Clinton just decided that this company became too hot for him, and for his wife who is now the official of the family. I listened to the Ban Ki-moon speech, the Paolo Scaroni speech, picked up an ENI documents gift bag, and went home where my wife told me that it was on TV that Hillary Clinton fell and injured her right elbow.

I got my lesson of not jumping to conclusions in the future before collecting more facts, but to be honest, even though I am very sorry for Hillary Clinton’s injury - I think she saved him from future embarrassment as it might have happened had he shared the dinner table last night.

————

WASHINGTON – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton fractured her right elbow during a fall Wednesday, her chief of staff said. Clinton was on her way to the White House when she fell chief of staff Cheryl Mills said.

Clinton was treated at The George Washington University Hospital, just a few blocks from State Department headquarters, before going home. She will undergo surgery to repair her elbow in the coming week, Mills said.

  ———————

Who was at the event? Obviously, many of the FPA members that paid $1,000 per person for that priviledge, but this time also many UN Ambassadors of oil producing countries and at least one top current official of a US oil company. When I looked for the very few Ambassadors from non-oil countries, I found that in India and Poland there is involvement By ENI as well.

Looking at the hand-out material from ENI - it comes in tabloid sized journals called simply “Oil” - the March 2009 Editorial evaluates the new Administration in Washington as: “The begining, however was warm, without being heartwarming.” The first article says that the real world crisis is water and then an article by former Senator Gary Hart, being introduced as a “renowned green politician” who advocates adapting a new lifestyle and energy saving as the only choice for America if it wants to free itself from dependency on oil supplies from the Gulf. Then “The challenge for Obama is foreign policy and not the economy.” That issue was called “Up & Down” and also contained among other material an interview - “Talking to Daniel Yergin” (from the Boston based CERA consultants) - “The impetus towards recovery from the energy industry - the transformations in the energy world will contribute to counterbalancing the downturn. The US and China will form a new axis of international growth.” Talking about Europe ENI finds that “Disunity can be Strength.” There is a positive article about India - “Elephant fights back,” there is the prediction of China increasing consumption, and of Cuba producing oil.

The June issue of “Oil” titled “the choice.” It starts with pieces on “the theocratic democracy in Iran” and then moves about Iran to “the future lies underground” and this means oil and more oil - leading to Obama’s “the choice” and it is about the US-Iran relationship - with protagonists - Obama and Ahmadi-Nejad. “Obama’s overture - the cold and the lukewarm.” It goes deeper - into “IRANOMICS” studying the policy mistakes made by the US in the past and the few issues US diplomacy should concentrate with. ENI finds that Ayatollah and the US have converging interests. Europe, above all, would gain most from a possible easing of tensions. However, talking to an Iranian ex-governor of the Central Bank - Moscow and some Arab countries are opposed to this for fear of losing their role. Not bad as policy studies paid for by oil!

From here to the need for “mature” diplomacy asa understood by Brent Scowcroft of the Nixon days and keeping an eye on geopolitics as seen by Richard Nathan Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations a clearly solid Republican home.

The former Italian Ambassador too India and Iran, Roberto Toscano, finds “less ideology in the Iranian puzzle” and he lifts the veil “on the “curse of oil and the role played by Italy.” Looking back to the days of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, there is hope in finding a future of thawing of relations with Iran that everyone can benefit. There is some more material and we clearly were impressed though we think that all of this goes against what President Obama said about Iraq that paraphrased meant - we will not be after your oil. Now clearly, if Washington does not find other topics of conversation with Iran in order to build a relationship - all of the above is rightly nothing more then another road to disaster.

We hope that someone sent a package of ENI to the missing Bill Clinton and we hope he would think like us - that this is not what Obama and Hillary need.

—–

To the essence of the event,  I will defer to  the excellent report by InnerCityPress - the writing is so good that we will not attempt to compete with it. I will only add that in his opening, when Mr. Ban Ki-moon tipped his hat to the Tamils, he said that he was the first and last of the world leaders to go to Sri Lanka. He also said he met there with Tamil leaders but as we understand from the press - the last point of meeting Tamils is being left in contention by people that were there with him - but where it seems that he does have a point is the fact that in today’s world the Tamils rank for nothing - so if nobody else in leadership position is speaking up for them - who is he to do so?Aha! but he is just getting the Humanitarian Award of the world corporate philanthropies - does that pass onto him the responsibility to go further then the common politicians?

UN’s Ban Tips Hat to Protesters from High Above NY, Claims He Met With Tamils.

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

UNITED NATIONS, June 17 — It was projected as a light evening of honor for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to receive from the Foreign Policy Association a Global Humanitarian Award, along with former US president Bill Clinton.

Clinton, however, canceled his appearance due to “family health issues” — word on the street, literally 55th Street in front of the St. Regis Hotel, was that Hillary was in a car crash. And Ban himself was protested, for hours, with chants urging him to resign, or to “go home,” or at least to feel shame.

The protesters, it must be said, were nearly entirely ethnic Tamils. Despite the tens of thousands of people killed in the war in Sri Lanka, unlike Darfur, Myanmar or the Middle East, the victims have yet to gain noticeable solidarity from non-Tamils. This feels of abandonment was palpable Wednesday night in front of the St. Regis Hotel.

Please read the excellent full report at: http://www.innercitypress.com/untrip4may…

=============

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.

—————

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?

————

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.”

 www.SustainabiliTank.info has taken the position that this relic of the cold war - the division of Korea - must come to an end like the division of Germany has come to an end, and a united Korea could become another Germany on the opposite end of Asia.

A United Korea would have a tremendous internal market for growth and in the future be a credible new actor of equal potential to Japan, in an area of the world that is bound to be the arena of an India - China rivalry for economic leadership. So, why did Korea not make strides towards union - besides the obvious that its two upper leaders’ strata - in both cases dictatorships - albeit more so in the North - plainly do not want to dilute their powers? The answer is also simple - the US, Japan, and China have learned to live with the status quo and love it. So, here comes North Korea - a fourth world country - and from time to time reminds us of their existence by doing some mischief - be this a nuclear bomb or a sale of arms to terrorists in some other corner of the world - i.e. to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

What should the world do? In our opinion the US should help the reunification process by getting the two halves to renew from where it was left in 2000 and tell the Chinese and the Japanese that it is good for them to remove the growing cancer of North Korea by embedding it within a larger economy that will not be bent to do mischief because they stand to lose much more then gain from this mischief - something that is missing when you look at North Korea alone.

Also, we welcomed in 2006 the election of Ban Ki-moon, the Korean UN Secretary-General - sort off - because despite the fact that we did not think he will do anything positive in our main areas of interest, we did believe that he will make the reunification of Korea a main issue of his term in office. But neigh, he did nothing remarkable, and under his baton the situation got only worse - with UN and UNDP catering to the North and syphoning funds into the coffers of mischief. He plainly gave in to his benefactors in Beijing and Washington and expressed his Korean pride only by doing things like going to visit South Korean scientists in Antarctica.

We found now the attached view of the Korea problematique worthwhile of further attention.
15.06.2009
Ninth Anniversary of 6.15 Joint Statement for Peace and Reunification of Korea
von Ronda Hauben, a correspondent accredited with the UN   http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/
Though the Sunshine Policy that has officially guided the struggle for Korean Reunification since June 15, 2000 may be under siege by the government of South Korea, the US government, and the United Nations Security Council, it was very much alive at the Overseas Koreans Conference for Peace and Reunification of Korea held in Washington DC. The conference marking the 9th anniversary of the historic agreement between the Heads of State of North and South Korea, was held on June 12-14 with several different events as part of the program.

It was with a sigh of relief that I left New York on Friday morning June 12 to travel to Washington DC where NAKA (the National Assocation of Korean Americans) was hosting this 3 day event.

At noon, in New York City on Friday, June 12, the United Nations Security Council passed SC Resolution 1874 imposing harsh sanctions against North Korea. Around the UN, the voice of reason has been drowned out in a sea of “waiting for Obama” sentiment, giving the Obama administration license to continue and even outdo the anti democratic policies of the Bush administration, especially when it comes to foreign policy. For example, his administration has increased the troops the US sends to Afghanistan, and encouraged the extensive military actions displacing the civilian population in Pakistan. But when it comes to North Korea, the policy has been especially harsh and hard line. This has been documented in an earlier article on this blog: What Should be the Role of the UN Regarding the Hostile US Policy toward North Korea?
The presentations and discussion at the conference helped to put what is happening at the UN into the bigger framework of US-Korean relations and North Korea-South Korea relations. This broader focus is one where there are now several generations of Koreans who have grown up since the rivalry of US and Soviet Union following World War II imposed the arbitrary separation on the Korean Peninsula of Korea divided into the two different nations which have come to be known as North Korea and South Korea.

“The separation itself is violent,” explained the first speaker at the Saturday morning panel, Park Soh-eye. Park is from Germany. She observed that the June 15, 2000 Declaration has had a significant symbolic effect. It provided a common aproach toward reunification for both North Korea and South Korea. After 60 years of separation, just to be able to look at the North Korean and South Korean flags in the same space was touching, she recalled.

Part of the impact of the 6.15 Joint Declaration in South Korea was to legalize talk of reunification which had been previously forbidden and criminalized by the National Security Law. The 6.15 Declaration had also broadened the reunification movement so that people from different sectors of society could participate, including diverse religious organizations, and diverse non religious organizations including conservative and progressive political groups. Park Soh-eye pointed to the fact that there has been much exchange between the Koreas since the 6.15 Joint Declaration, exchanges that have resulted in both qualitative and quantitative change.

The forced separation of Koreans had led to new problems so that it became clear that there were problems in both North and South Korea produced by the reality of the artifical separation. But just as the separation produced a new set of problems, the acts toward reunification were a means to solve the problems. Park Soh-eye offered the analogy that if we consider the separation the disease, with its harmful effects, the reunification provided a medication, with curing qualitites.
On Friday evening there had been a short set of talks at the dinner held at a Korean restaurant in Tysons Corner, Virginia. US Congressman Eni Faleomavaega of American Samoa, who is the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee Subcomittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment, gave a short presentation about his support for the Sunshine Policy and his respect for the work done by former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung.

Another talk at the Saturday Conference was presented by Kim Chang-soo, who had been on the National Security Council in the Roh Myung-bak administration. Kim Chang-soo reviewed some of the recent events in the relations between the two Koreas. When Lee Myun-bak, the current President of South Korea, began his presidency in February 2008, he did not recognize the June 15 or October 4 agreements with North Korea negotiated by the previous two Presidents of South Korea. The Lee regime, in abandoning the Sunshine policy, turned to criticizing North Korea as well as military exercises with US which are viewed as hostile activities by North Korea.

While the media has focused on blaming the problems developing in the relationship between North Korea, and the US and South Korea on internal problems in North Korea, it has failed to take into account the broader issues and context. North Korea has indicated it is willing to talk about the nuclear issues with the US on a one to one basis, which would include talking about the US protection of South Korean under the US nuclear umbrella. Kim Chang-soo proposed that North Korea is trying to get diplomatic recognition from the US as well as address the economic issues of its people. But the current world media focuses on problems with North Korea, rather than why the US is not doing anything to encourage negotiations.

Kim Chang-soo suggested that the upcoming summit between Lee Myung-bak and Barack Obama was important and has the potential to have serious military implications. He cautioned against Obama failing to realize that Lee Myung-bak is considered as a repressive dictator and that there is a long tradition of the US government supporting dictatorial regimes in South Korea. Such support for Lee Myung-bak by the US government would remind the people of South Korea of this past experience, including the resentment that spread across South Korea more recently when 2 middle school girls were killed by a US military tank. Kim Chang-soo advised Obama to keep this all in mind when he meets the President of South Korea.
In offering some observations about the current tense situation created between the US and North Korea by the US support for the harsh Security Council Resolution that has just been passed at the UN, Kim Chang-soo referred to several analogous periods when despite the tension between the US and another country, it was possible to make progress in normalizing relations. One such example was the tense situation when China normalized relations with the US in the early 1970s. Similarly despite the hostility of the Bush administration years, negotiations were begun in earnest toward the latter part of Bush’s tenure in office.

The current sanctions, against North Korea, however, he pointed out, are frought with danger as they even go beyond the mandate of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) that in itself has the potential to provoke military encounters. The Security Council’s sanctions present a form of contradiction with the Armistice Agreement between North Korea and the UN Command, which forbids one side from blockading the other side. The provision to forcibly inspect North Korean ships and take them over contradicts the terms of the Armistice, as do the provisions cutting off financial interactions with North Korea. These are measures which are provocative.

Kim Chang-soo observed that Obama’s policy is similar to Bush’s policy. We need to ask for a fresh policy approach from the Obama administration, he suggested. He advised that there is a need for a very special high level envoy to go to North Korea to change the direction. Also he proposed that an exchange of cultural events and people to people interactions could be helpful.

For the upcoming meeting between the US and South Korean presidents, Kim Chang-soo proposed the relations with North Korea need to address not only denuclearization, but also diplomatic recognition, inter Korea exchanges, and forging peace in Northeast Asia. Kim Chang-soo advised that Lee Myung-bak recognize the significance of the June 15 Declaration and continue to implement that spirit and to promote this spirit when he meets with Obama, rather than a tough military approach to North Korea.

Among the other talks in the Saturday panel was a talk by Oh Indong, who is a doctor who has done pioneering work in artifical joint replacement. Dr. Oh gave a slide presentation of his medical efforts to help North Korean doctors master these medical techniques.

In thinking about the impact of the events at the conference, it seems that US and North Korean relations are at a particularly low point with the danger of a military confrontation increasing significantly. At such a time, it is particularly important to consider the achievements of the Sunshine Policy and the 6.15 Joint Declaration as a means to support peace and reunification, rather than war, on the Korean Peninsula. The fact that World War II has left serious scars and wounds on the Korean Peninsula, leaving the separation of Korea into North Korea and South Korea as a continuing condition, is a serious problem for the world, not just for the Korean people. Also the US government’s refusal to agree to a peace treaty to end the Korean war means that there is a particularly dangerous situation on the Korean Peninsula. The Armistice is but a temporary truce, not a means of more permanently preventing a return to military action.

A number of conversations at the conference, however, emphasized that people in Korea have faced many hardships over the years so that this difficult time is not unusual for them. One speaker on Friday evening summing up this sentiment admitted, “I feel sometimes hopeless.” But along with this sentiment, he explained his belief that there is a basis for hope. He reminded those at the conference, “But our people have been through so many hardships. Because of that they know who is evil and who is not. The Korean people are very sensitive to evil. So I am hopeful. We shouldn’t be passive. As our voices get bigger, we’ll get more power. We shouldn’t appeal to Lee Myung-bak. We should appeal to the people.”
——————–
11.06.2009
What Should be the Role of the UN Regarding the Hostile US Policy toward North Korea?
von Ronda Hauben
The US policy toward North Korea since Barack Obama has assumed the US presidency is very different from the promises of engagement which he made during his election campaign. This policy presents a striking example of the disparity between the preelection promises and the action taken thus far during the Obama presidency.

On the first day of the new administration, sanctions were authorized against three North Korean firms under the Arms Export Control Act, along with several nonproliferation executive orders. The three firms were KOMID, which had been sanctioned by other administrations,  Sino-Ki and Moksong Trading Company, which were being sanctioned for the first time. (1)

The hostile direction of Obama’s policy, however, has been signaled most clearly by the change made when the new administration failed to reappoint Christopher Hill to his position as Undersecretary of State for East Asia and the head of the US negotiation team for the six-party talks with North Korea.

Not only was Hill not reappointed, but the role of US negotiator with North Korea was downgraded and split among several different officials. A part time position was created for an envoy. Another person would be the US representative to the six-party talks. And still another official was to be appointed to the position of Undersecretary of State for East Asia, which was Hill’s former position.

Stephen Bosworth accepted the position as envoy. His official title is Special Representative for North Korea Policy. Bosworth did so on a part time basis. At the same time, he maintained his full time position as Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University along with his new part time job.

There has been little public discussion about why the Obama administration made such significant changes. The Boston Globe, in an article about Bosworth’s appointment, refers to the concerns expressed by  Leon Sigal, the  director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York. The article quotes Sigal saying that there are officials in the new administration, “who don’t think we can get anywhere, so they don’t want to do the political heavy lifting to try.”(2)

In contrast to the loss of Hill as a negotiator with North Korea, the Obama administration reappointed  Stuart Levey, as the Undersecretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. Levey’s office in the Treasury Department, was created in 2004 under George W. Bush. This office was used to impose economic sanctions on North Korea. One such action was the act of freezing the funds that North Korea had in a bank in Macao, China, the Banco Delta Asia (BDA).
North Korea was not only denied access to $25 million dollars of its funds, but was also denied the use of the international banking system. This freezing of North Korean funds was announced shortly after North Korea and the five other nations who were part of the six party talks signed the September 19, 2005 agreement to denuclearize the Korean Penninsula.(3) The announcement by the Treasury Department sabotaged the implementation of this important agreement which would have gone a long way toward the goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. North Korea withdrew from the six party talks until the $25 million was returned. (4)

It is significant here to note that Levey and his office briefly came under public scrutiny in 2006 when the New York Times published an article exposing how the office has access to and uses the SWIFT Data Base to do intelligence work targeting people and transactions that it claims are in violation of US law. (5) The SWIFT Data Base contains the transations and identification information for the hundreds of thousands of people and entities that do electronic banking transactions using the SWIFT system.

The action by the US Treasury using a section of the Patriot Act against the Banco Delta Asia Bank, however, demonstrated that the US government has the ability to use this data base information against those it wants to target politically, rather than those who have committed any actual illegal acts. Testimony by former US government officials to the US Congress, and documents submitted to the US government by the bank owner and his lawyer, demonstrated that there was never any evidence offered of any illegal acts. Instead the Patriot Act had been used to allow the US government to act against this bank for political objectives. (See“Behind the Blacklisting of Banco Delta Asia: Is the policy aimed at targeting China as well as North Korea?”)

The new positions that the administration has designated to negotiate with North Korea are at a lower administrative level than was Hill’s former position In addition,  the Obama administration, by not reappointing Hill to his prior position, has lost the expertise Hill had developed. Hill had effectively countered the sabotage to negotiations presented by Levey’s office during the Bush administration.

At every step of the way that Hill sought to engage North Korea, he met with opposition within the Bush administration. Remarkably, Hill found the means to effectively counter much of this opposition, making progress in the negotiations. In August, 2008, however, the Bush administration unilaterally changed what it claimed North Korea’s obligations were as part of Phase 2 of the talks, and falsely declared North Korea in violation. (6)

With Hill gone from the North Korean desk at the State Department, and Levey reappointed to his position at the Treasury Department, it is significant that Obama sent an interagency group to visit the capitals of Japan, South Korea and China to discuss what strategy to use to punish North Korea. Levey was prominently featured as one of the US government officials on the trip.

These officials included Special Representative for North Korea Policy, Stephen Bosworth who accompanied Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy (or Wallace Gregson, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia-Pacific Affairs), Undersecretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey, and Jeffrey Bader, Senior Director for Asian Affairs, National Security Council.

But is punishment appropriate? There has been no similar effort to open negotiations with North Korea.

Instead of the Obama administration building on the achievements that Christopher Hill and the lead negotiator for North Korea, Kim Kye-gwan had made in their negotiations, the US administration has given its support to Levey and others whose actions have sabotaged the success of the six-party talks. The failure of the Obama administration is similar, however, to what has come before with regard to US  policy on North Korea.

Robert Carlin, part of the US government negotiation team with North Korea under the Clinton Administration, documents that there were significant and successful negotiations on 22 issues carried out in the period between 1993 and 2000. (7)  These achievements, however, were not put into a form under the Clinton Administration that could survive the transition to the Bush Administration.

Similarly, Mike Chinoy, a former CNN journalist, in his book “Meltdown”, documents both the Clinton years and much of the saga during the Bush years and how the negotiations were torpedoed not by North Korea, but each time by forces within the US government itself.(8)

Besides a long set of successful negotiations between North Korea and the US followed by the US reneging first on its agreements, the US conducts frequent military maneuvers in the vicinity of North Korea which North Korea has claimed is a threat to its peace and security.

On April 5, 2009, North Korea test launched a communications satellite using a rocket of advanced design. This test broke no international law or treaty to which North Korea is a party. (9) Still the launch was condemned by the UN Security Council in a Presidential Statement. Also new sanctions were imposed on North Korea, stating as the authority for them, a previous Security Council Resolution, SC Resolution 1718. (10)

North Korea has been the target of hostile acts by the US. North Korea has tested rockets and has done tests of two nuclear devices, which it claims it needs as a deterrent. The US has military agreements with Japan and South Korea, which includes them under the protection of the US nuclear umbrella. There is only an armistice ending the fighting of the Korean War. The US as the head of the UN command has not been willing to agree to a treaty ending the Korean War.

The failure of the UN Security Council to explore the problem that North Korea is facing in trying to check the hostility it has encountered from the US government demonstrates the failure of the processes of the UN Security Council in carrying out its obligations under the UN charter. The lesson North Korea took from the Security Council failure to protect Iraq from the invasion by the US is a lesson that other nations will also take if there is no means found for the Security Council to reform its processes so that it doesn’t just become a means for the political targeting of a nation as happened with Iraq. (11)

In his comments to journalists in response to the sanctions put on North Korea in April 2009, the Deputy Ambassador to the UN from North Korea, Pak Tok Hun said, “The recent activities of the security council concerning the peaceful use of outer space by my country shows that unless the security council is totally reformed and democratized we expect nothing from it.” (12)

The challenge to the nations of the UN is to provide a more neutral and considered investigation of the problem it is trying to solve rather than just carrying out the punishment a P-5 nation may endeavor to inflict on another nation.

——————————–
Notes
1. Karin Lee and Julia Choi, “North Korea: Unilateral and Multilateral Economic Sanctions and U.S. Department of Treasury Actions, 1955-April 2009”, National Committee on North Korea, (Paper last updated April 28, 2009), p.26.
 http://www.nautilus.org/fora/security/09…
2. James F. Smith, “In role as envoy, Tufts dean carries hard-earned lessons”, The Boston Globe, May 26, 2009, http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articl…
3. Ronda Hauben, “North Korea’s $25 Million and Banco Delta Asia: Another Abuse under the US Patriot Act”, OhmyNews International March 3, 2007. http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/…
4.  Ronda Hauben, “Behind the Blacklisting of Banco Delta Asia: Is the policy aimed at targeting China as well as North Korea?”, OhmyNews International, May 18, 2007 http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/…
5. Erick Lichtblau and James Risen, “Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror”, New York Times, June 23, 2006.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/washin…
6. Ronda Hauben, “US Media and the Breakdown in the Six-Party Talks”, OhmyNews International, September 28, 2008.
 http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/…
7. Robert Carlin, “Negotiating with North Korea: Lessons Learned and Forgotten”, “Korea Yearbook  2007”, Edited by Rudiger Frank et al, Brill, 2007, p. 235-251.
8. Mike Chinoy, “Meltdown”,  St. Martin’s Press, 2008,
9. Ronda Hauben, “Controversy at UN Over North Korea’s Launch: Reconvening six-party talks or penalizing Pyongyang? “, OhmyNews International, April 10, 2009.
 http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/…
10. Ronda Hauben, “Security Council’s Ad Hoc Actions Increase Tension on Korean Peninsula: [Analysis] North Korea responds by withdrawing from six-party talks as promised”,OhmyNews International, April 17, 2009. http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/…
11. Seumas Milne, “After Iraq It’s Not Just North Korea that Wants a Bomb”, Guardian Comment Is Free, May 29, 2009.
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/…
12. Pak Tok Hun, Informal Comments to the Media at the UN Media Stakeout, April 24, 2009.
 http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/ondemand/st…

Environment -Renewable energy

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/09/china-green-energy-solar-wind

China launches green power revolution to catch up on west.
• Plan to hit 20% renewable target by 2020
• $30bn for low-carbon projects

Julian Borger and Jonathan Watts in Beijing
The Guardian,     Wednesday 10 June 2009

China’s ambitious wind and solar plans represent a direct challenge to Europe’s claims of world leadership on cutting carbon emissions.
The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarification column, Thursday 11 June 2009.

{Below we confused the absolute with the incremental in reporting yesterday that a rise in temperature of 2.7C corresponds to an increase of 36.9F. It is 4.9F.}

China is planning a vast increase in its use of wind and solar power over the next decade and believes it can match Europe by 2020, producing a fifth of its energy needs from renewable sources, a senior Chinese official said yesterday.

Zhang Xiaoqiang, vice-chairman of China’s national development and reform commission, told the Guardian that Beijing would easily surpass current 2020 targets for the use of wind and solar power and was now contemplating targets that were more than three times higher.

But the indirect green share in the stimulus, in the form of investment in carbon-efficient transport and electricity transmission systems, would be far larger.

HSBC Global Research estimated the total green share could be over a third of the total package.

China also believes the price reforms that will take place in its economic recovery programme will lead to more efficient use of resources and an increased demand for renewable energy.

“Due to the impact of global financial crisis, people are all talking about green and sustainable development,” Zhang added. “Enterprises and government at all levels are showing more enthusiasm for the development of solar for power generation, and the Chinese government is now considering rolling out more stimulus policies for the development of solar power.”

He said the government would also plough money into the expansion of solar heating systems. He said the country was already a world leader, with 130m square metres of solar heating arrays already installed, and was planning to invest more. The US goal for solar heating by 2020 is 200m square metres.

Zhang was speaking in London on a day China came under increased pressure from Washington to do more cut its emissions.

David Sandalow, the US assistant secretary of energy, said the continuation of business as usual in China would result in a 2.7C rise in temperatures even if every other country slashed greenhouse gas emissions by 80%.

“No effective deal will be possible without the US and China, which together account for almost half of the planet’s carbon emissions.”

Zhang said China was pursuing “a constructive and a positive role” in negotiations aimed at agreeing a deal in Copenhagen. As part of that agreement, he said developing countries would have to pursue “a sustainable development path”, and said Beijing was open to the idea of limits on the carbon intensity of its economy (the emissions per unit of output).

“We have taken note of some expert suggestions on carbon intensity with a view to have some quantified targets in this regard. We are carrying out a serious study of those suggestions,” Zhang said.

Zhang told the all-party parliamentary China group in Westminster yesterday that Beijing’s stimulus package was already showing signs of re-energising the Chinese economy. He said it grew by 6.1% in the first quarter of this year, and growth in the second quarter would be stronger than the first. He predicted that China would meet its target of 8% growth this year.

 THE ECONOMIST, June 11, 2009 -

http://www.economist.com/world/internationl/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13825201

had an article “Secretary-general of the UN - The score at half-time - Ban Ki-moon has turned in a mixed performance so far. He needs to improve.”

This article prompted questioning on the part of Matthew Russell Lee at the Press Conference at the UN and this resulted in an interesting posting on InnerCityPress.

UN’s Ban Questioned on Record, on Sri Lanka, Half Time Pep Talk -all this as there is an ECONOMIST evaluation of the Ban Ki-moon UN at half-time of his First Term.
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, June 11 — Half way into the five year term as UN Secretary General he was awarded in 2006, Ban Ki-moon on June 11 tried to defend low grades he has received for his management of the UN and not “speaking truth to power.”

At Mr. Ban’s press conference for June, his spokesperson Michele Montas pointedly did not call on Inner City Press. Only a week before she had said the UN should be able to regulate the Press, after a memo revealed her attendance at a May 8 meeting at which legal threats and “complaining to Google News” about Inner City Press was discussed. On June 11, she looked elsewhere to award the right to question.

But CNN’s longtime correspondent, characteristically classy, yielded his question to Inner City Press. {Video posted on that website} To inquire into Ban’s views on his Spokesperson’s and top officials’ seeming underlying of freedom of the press, while necessary and to later be asked, had to take a back seat to a bigger picture question. From the UN’s transcript, the question and then Ban’s annotated answer:

Inner City Press: There is an article in today’s Economist, called “Ban Ki-moon - the score at half time”. It reviews half of your first term. I want to ask you to respond to it. Under the rubric “truth to power” they give you a three out of ten, and they use the example of Sri Lanka - they say that Mr. Ban denied that the UN had leaked grim civilian casualty figures. On management they give two out of ten. There are some better grades, I acknowledge. On management, they say there is a problem with communicating with senior staff, that you have to show more leadership in drumming up peacekeepers.

I might add to that, protection of whistle-blowers and free press. I just wanted to know, do you agree with any of this critique, are there things you intend to do better in a second term? What do you make of this piece in the Economist assigning those two grades?

SG: I would regard it as the judgment of the Economist. There may be a different judgment on my performance. First of all, during the last two and a half years, I had three priorities. First of all, to catalyze a global response to critical global issues – like climate change, managing the consequences of the international economic crisis, global health and global terrorism. On climate change, you may agree with me that from almost dead - if not dead, a dormant status - this issue has risen to the level of leaders of the world. It has become a top priority issue of this world. I am going to really work hard to seal the deal in Copenhagen in December. I am working for all humanity, for the future of Planet Earth.

more on this please read at:  http://www.innercitypress.com/ban09june2…

and we hope indeed that our readers will indeed be interested to go to the referenced originals. We clearly have difficulty with the credits the UNSG avails himself on the climate change issue - just because folks that are not too familiar with the issues did indeed say some good things about areas they are less interested in.
for www.SustainabiliTank.com, the Economist’s evaluation of the UNSG involvement on Climate Change is much too high at a 8/10 grade. We would not give him personally more then a 4/10 as we think that (a) there was really no progress whatsoever and (b) whatever the advances in the public’s  perception of the problem came from the UK initiative at the UN Security Council and from the President of the UN General Assembly, Definitely not from the UNSG or from his staff at the UN Department of Public Information that to our evaluation worked basically against the dissemination of climate change information. To them - those interested in the subject are plain hot headed NGOs.

Further, as we and those in the know say, hyping up Copenhagen will not bring real results in December - as important as that meeting is indeed.

We got insensed enough to actually post a comment on the ECONOMIST’s web - as follows:

 PincasJ wrote:June 12, 2009 21:14
The 8/10 score for “The bigger picture” - “To his credit, climate change was Mr Ban’s early priority” is just wrong and too high. I had the chance to ask Mr. Ban Ki-moon questions on climate change, at the Asia Society, back in October 2006, when he was still campaigning for the job, and was not impressed that he understood the implications fully, or what was started under his predecessor Kofi Annan.

When he got the job, he brought in a new USG for Information - Mr. Akasaka to replace the Kofi Annan appointee Shashi Tharoor - and the UN Department of Public Information, under Director Fawzi, and Press Accreditation Chief Fowlie, started to remove from the whole UN system all those interested in climate change - saying these are just hot NGOs. If a journalist was asking those days about Darfur in context of climate change, that was a cause to remove the journalist as his question was deemed inappropriate - and that might have been the one journalist who indeed understood the subject - and that might be today accepted knowledge

In short, it was in 2007, the UK under their previous Prime Minister, at the time of their Presidency of the Security Council, that saved climate change as a topic in the UN of Ban - his trip to visit Korean scientists at the Antarctica or similar excesses aside.

On the “bigger picture” I would rather give Mr. Ban a 4/10 and this in part for when approached personally he still did not intervene with his staff. The World deserved and probably should get better.

PincasJ (Pincas Jawetz of www.SustainabiliTank.info)

—————-

So, what is this all in our view:  The UN’s secretary-general - His score at half-time?

THE ECONOMIST article of June 11, 2009 - http://www.economist.com/world/internati…

and they have also a series of comments -   http://www.economist.com/world/internati…

those on top of the reaction at the UN to that article as we posted based on the Inner City Press.

We hope our readers will go to the original article and we will just concentrate at what was actually the one solid positive remark of which we are really quite unenthusiastic as we think it is just inaccurate. That is the so called “Bigger Picture” score -  that The Economist posted right after the “Truth to Power” evaluation;

The original from THE ECONOMIST:

Truth to power: 3/10 There is nothing wrong with quiet diplomacy if it gets the job done. Mr Ban’s low-profile efforts got humanitarian aid into Myanmar after the cyclone where others failed. All the same there is a sense that he ducks too easily, too often.

After a tough word with Robert Mugabe produced a tongue-lashing in return, say insiders, Mr Ban did his darnedest never to upset Zimbabwe’s despot again. Similarly he tries not to cross the Russians, who are also prone to throwing tantrums.

Mr Ban is hoping for re-election; indeed, he keeps score of the miles he travels and the hands he shakes. Partly for that reason, say UN-watchers, he tries not to offend China over the conflict in Darfur, and over efforts by the International Criminal Court to arrest Sudan’s president, an ally of China’s, on war-crimes charges. Not wanting to annoy America, Israel’s chief ally, Mr Ban also largely kept his head down over the fighting in Gaza.

After Sri Lanka’s war ended, Mr Ban denied that the UN had leaked grim civilian casualty figures (indeed, some UN officials reportedly sought to suppress the toll). That obscured his other responses—such as an appeal to aid the Tamil refugees. With Sri Lanka’s government shielded by China, India and others at the Security Council and at the UN Human Rights Commission, human-rights groups had hoped Mr Ban would speak up more for the victims.

•   The bigger picture: 8/10 To his credit, climate change was Mr Ban’s early priority. He brought together government heads and nudged their officials along when agreement seemed elusive, putting his best Secretariat brains to work on the issue. When the food crisis erupted, he quickly knocked heads together so that various bodies, including the World Bank and the World Food Programme, could co-operate and help vulnerable countries. Yet the credit crunch has again pushed the UN to the sidelines.

We clearly agree to the 3/10 assessment of “Truth to Power” but completely disagree with the 8/10 score on “The Bigger Picture” - here it should have been in all honesty just 4/10 and no more.

We made our case in previous paragraphs and in our post at THE ECONOMIST. Keeping one’s head down in order to get reelected = the hallmark of good diplomacy - is in effect dooming the UN from becoming a serious institution.

———–

We expect to meet the UNSG this coming WEdnesday when he and former US President Bill Clinton get from the US Foreign Policy Association the  Global Humanitarian Awards at the Global Philanthropy Awards Dinner.
The St. Regis, New York City
June 17, 2009 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM

Following, Paolo Scaroni, Chief Executive Officer, ENI, and Brendan Dougher, Managing Partner, New York Metro Region, PricewaterhouseCoopers will receive the Foreign Policy Association’s Corporate Social responsibility Award.

The Foreign Policy Association’s Corporate Social Responsibility Award is given to individuals and companies who are committed to good corporate citizenship in the communities they serve.

Recent recipients of the Corporate Social Responsibility Award include Paul S. Otellini, president and CEO, Intel Corporation; and David M. Cote, chairman and CEO, Honeywell International; and John J. Conroy, chairman and CEO, Baker & McKinsey.

We assume that President Clinton gets the Global Humanitarian Award for the terrific amount of work he did in his post-Presidency era.

We can thus assume that UNSG Ban Ki-moon gets his Global Humanitarian Award as an encouragement for good deeds in the remainder of the time he will lead the World body.

We will report on what we learn from the aura at the FPA, the speeches given, and the important folks in the hall.

             Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University.

Revisioning Human-Earth Relations

 http://fore.research.yale.edu/index.html

The Forum on Religion and Ecology is the largest international multireligious project of its kind. With its conferences, publications, and website it is engaged in exploring religious worldviews, texts, and ethics in order to broaden understanding of the complex nature of current environmental concerns.

The Forum recognizes that religions need to be in dialogue with other disciplines (e.g., science, ethics, economics, education, public policy, gender) in seeking comprehensive solutions to both global and local environmental problems.

Forum Coordinators:
Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, Yale University

Forum Administrative Assistant:
Tara C. Maguire Knopick, Yale University

Forum Web Content Managers and Newsletter Editors:
Sam Mickey and Elizabeth McAnally, California Institute of Integral Studies

With thanks to Anne Custer for the original development of the Forum Web site, and Ann Keeler Evans and Donna Rosenberg for their administrative work with the Forum.

————-

Summer Solstice Celebration with Paul Winter & Friends

Dear Forum community,

We want to inform you about the Summer Solstice Celebration with Paul Winter & Friends on Saturday, June 20, 2009. The two-hour concert will begin at 4:30 a.m. and will be held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (1047 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY).

Paul Winter will be joined by an array of outstanding musicians from different musical backgrounds for a festival of the Earth’s music as we greet the summer and one of the longest days of the year. The Summer Solstice Celebration is a sublime experience; the first rays of sunlight filter through the Cathedral’s stained glass above the High Altar as guest artists and members of the Paul Winter Consort perform in different parts of the Cathedral. The musicians meet at the stage in the Great Crossing as morning overtakes night and we welcome the day.

This celebration will be dedicated to Thomas Berry.

For more information, including free music downloads, visit: http://solsticeconcert.com/

Tickets are now on sale at: https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/729160…

Warmly,
The Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale
 http://www.yale.edu/religionandecology

David Rothkopf -From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

David J. Rothkopf (born 24 December 1955) is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, specializing in U.S. foreign policy and economic strategy, as well as an international business consultant and professor. He served as the Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade during the administration of Bill Clinton. After leaving Commerce, Rothkopf became managing director of Kissinger and Associates in January 1996.

As a Carnegie fellow, he wrote Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power. In addition, he is chairman and CEO of The Rothkopf Group, LLC, a consulting firm, and Garten Rothkopf LLC, a firm that focuses on emerging markets.

He previously was a founder and CEO of Intellibridge, a strategic analysis firm in Washington D.C., United States. A prolific writer, Rothkopf has authored more than 150 articles on international issues for a variety of publications, most recently for the Washington Post and Intellibridge’s Homeland Security Monitor. He is a 1977 graduate of Columbia College and attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

 http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/posts/…

David Rothkopf’s blog  -  http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/blog/4…

—————–

Turn the U.N. into Condos  - You can’t spell unproductive without the letters “U” and “N”…
Thu, 06/11/2009

I’m one of those guys that the conspiracy theorists love to hate says David Rothkopf.
I not only believe that we need stronger global governance mechanisms, I believe that the reinvention of our global governance system is one of the great shared missions of the world for the century ahead. Whether it is strengthening institutions that regulate trade or climate, finance or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, or whether it is creating multilateral enforcement mechanisms with real teeth, the international system of nation states and very weak multilateral mechanisms we currently have is showing its age and is simply not up to satisfying the obligations of the social contract in the global era. In the eyes of the conspiracy maniacs … weakened by too much time staring at anti-Bilderberg, anti-Davos, anti-World Jewish Conspiracy Web sites … this makes me a world government guy and a threat to the natural order. (Which apparently is manifested in a libertarian fantasy land of white guys living in shacks and RVs far from the influence of any cultural tradition but their own. The notion of one nation under Toby Keith seems a little dubious to me, but then again, most of these guys think people like me would best serve as hood ornaments.)

Having said that, watching the UN continue its kabuki theater concerning North Korea makes me want to shut the place down, convert it to condos and remit the funds to the former member states. Even in a down New York real estate market it is almost certain to be a better return on investment for the dollars poured into that white elephant on the East River than “outcomes” like the proposed sanctions on Pyongyang. This is particularly tragic since containing and ultimately eliminating the threats posed by states like North Korea and other proliferators seems to me a vital role for the UN or at least for some international mechanism. But you can’t stand up to the bad guy without a spine and the UN has been an invertebrate by design since it first crawled out of San Francisco Bay in April 1945.

No one wanted anything like a strong world governance structure back then and so they built a talking shop that makes most freshman philosophy seminars look like decisive drivers of global change. Basically the organization was designed along the lines of the conflict resolution sessions my daughters’ elementary school used to use when students got into a fight. The combatants would be sat down in a room, asked to explain the problem, and then told to apologize and make up or else. Of course the “or else” was the equivalent of the great parental technique of counting to three, you didn’t know what might happen once you got to the point of no return but you were sure it was bad.

To my eldest daughter’s credit at one point she got into a fight with a budding bitchlet from the grade ahead of her and when asked to say they were friends, she refused. She sensed that there would be no repercussions. Who knew that my adorable little cupcake and Kim Jong-Il would have that much in common.

He must be sitting there with his 26 year-old son, Kim Jong-Un, his recently anointed successor, in their badly paneled rumpus room full of tapes of old American movies playing their favorite video game (Grand Theft Plutonium) and cackling at the wimps on Manhattan Upper East Side. Seriously, I can hardly understand how in a city in which every cab driver is prepared to get all up in your grille about the most casual comment, these UN folks can manage to negotiate the basics of daily life. It takes more gumption than they have ever displayed to get a waiter to bring you a menu at most Manhattan coffee shops. (I’ve seen “Gossip Girl.” I know how that part of town works. Blair Waldorf would have Ban Ki Moon braiding her hair and carrying her books to school within seconds of their first meeting.)

In essence, the new tough stand of the UN, orchestrated by the United States, has two parts. In the first, we essentially reiterate what we’ve said in the past about interdicting shipments of weapons materials. But this time, folks, we say it with feeling. There is no commitment by anyone to actually stop or inspect North Korean ships and there is no UN mechanism obligating or even sanctioning the use of force. We also plan to cut off financing options for the starving country … except those that pertain to humanitarian or development needs. Of course, money is fungible and the government has shown a real willingness to spend on arms in the past while letting its people eat grass, so why we think this tactic won’t just produce more humanitarian and development needs … which in turn will be met … is beyond me.

In all the articles on these developments, the usual suspects at think tanks and in the diplomatic community say all this matters because this time the Russians and the Chinese are really pissed off. Yes, maybe. But apparently not pissed off enough to actually collaborate in the production of anything that might actually change North Korean behavior. (Their approach, written on the package every North Korean bomb comes seems to have been lifted from a shampoo bottle: Threaten…negotiate/buy time for program development…win aid packages…repeat as necessary.) How was it all described by that UN expert from Stratford-on-Avon? “A lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (They didn’t call it the Globe Theater for nothing.)

Further - writing from India, David Rithkopf continues: Also, for the record, on the broader point of this blog, despite my being a very big fan of this wonderful country (India) and a big supporter of it having a much bigger role on the international stage and in America’s foreign policy priorities, I don’t like the nuke deal we cut with them either.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, the world’s complacency on proliferation will produce one or more of the great tragedies of the century ahead. (As in the North Korea case, the international community has developed and seems to be sticking to a three-speed plan on proliferation these days: cooperate with proliferators, cut them a lot slack or cut them a little slack. Just in case you wanted to know what was responsible for that ticking sound you hear…)

—————–

David Rothkopf has previously expressed his feelings against nuclear proliferation. In this article from his blog, we realize that he thinks US policy is on nuclear issues equal to that on the banks and other financial institutions - that is the TOO BIG TO FAIL - OR CALL IT TOO ADVANCED IN THE SINKING-IN-THE-MUD FEELING TO BE PUNISHED.

Now, as if Rothkopf had anticipated my above revelation, he hapily provided further hints about moves of the Obama Presidency in another of his blogs:

“Can the Obama administration really believe that merging Chrysler into Fiat
is actually going to help either? Chrysler’s best minds left after their last merger with Daimler Benz. Fiat doesn’t have one single leading international brand. Is it really credible that if one of the world’s most successful auto companies (Daimler Benz) couldn’t save Chrysler that a combination of one of the world’s most mediocre (Fiat) and a bunch of government guys who don’t know anything about cars plus some union members who helped screw things up in the first place are going to do it?

Here in India, taxi drivers talk with palpable pride at the advent of the Tata Nano, a tiny car that is a source of great national pride. Business executives cite the ease with which they meet much higher average gasoline mileage targets than posed in the United States. I mean, I get it, this is a very poor country with a wide range of desperate needs (over 40 percent of Indians don’t have access to electricity yet). But you’ve got to ask which way the trends are pushing us…and you also have to ask why the United States has not made a more urgent priority of dramatically strengthening relations with this country. Such a relationship could not be more central to containing the threat in Pakistan, counter-balancing China, promoting democracy and managing a whole host of global threats from climate to proliferation. To be perfectly honest, I think a lot more real and lasting (rather than symbolic and likely to be fleeting) good would be likely to come from President Obama making a trip to the land of Gandhi than his recent trip to the land of Mubarak and Nasser.”

——————-

Before concluding above post, I observed also an e-mail from the UN that was happily informing us that the US House of Representatives has voted to pay all arrears since 1999 to the UN, and in hope that the Senate will decide in a similar way - the UN will now get all those funds that the previous Administrations thought were for expenditures that were not in the US interest. It says:

Dear Pincas,

Great news! This week, the House of Representatives took a significant step forward in strengthening our relationship with the UN.

By passing the Foreign Relations Authorization Act (HR 2410), developed by Chairman Howard Berman, the House Foreign Affairs Committee is authorizing full payment of all debt the U.S. has accumulated at the United Nations since 1999.

….

Besides addressing U.S. debts to the UN, this comprehensive legislation would:

Support the U.S. payment of UN dues on time (or at least not 9 months late!); lift the arbitrary legislative cap on peacekeeping contributions; and meet its ongoing financial commitments to the UN and other important international organizations.

Maintain robust support for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR); build training capacity to support rapid deployment of UN peacekeepers; and allow the U.S. to join other nations in helping make critically needed helicopters available for UN authorized peacekeeping missions.

Authorize critical resources for the State Department and USAID to help prevent, mitigate, and peacefully resolve crises; and create new incentives for Foreign Service Officers to serve in posts focusing on multilateral diplomacy and human rights.

But while this is an important victory, more work lies ahead.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee must craft and pass its own bill before any legislation can be sent to the President. To make sure your voices are being heard, the Better World Campaign has met with the Committee to emphasize the need to include UN language in its version of the Foreign Relations Authorization bill.

Of course, it will take some time to draft this bill, but we wanted to keep you in the loop.

….

So stay tuned, and thank you for your help in strengthening U.S.-UN relations!

Best,

Your friends at Better World Campaign
 http://www.BetterWorldCampaign.org/

In What Format and Under What Timeframe Would China Take on Climate Commitments? A Roadmap to 2050

From: ZhongXiang Zhang
East-West Center - Research Program

June 2, 2009

Abstract:

Given that China is already the world’s largest carbon emitter and its emissions continue to rise rapidly in line with its industrialization and urbanization, there is no disagreement that China eventually needs to take on binding greenhouse gas emissions caps. However, the key challenges are when that would occur and what credible interim targets China would need to take on during this transition period. This paper takes these challenges by mapping out the roadmap for China’s specific commitments towards 2050. Specifically, I suggest that China make credible quantified domestic commitments during the second commitment period, commit to voluntary no lose targets during the third commitment period, adopt binding carbon intensity targets during the fourth commitment period, and take on binding emissions caps starting the fifth commitment period and aimed for the global convergence of per capita emissions by 2050. These proposed commitments should be viewed as China’s political commitments, not necessarily China’s actual takings in the ongoing international climate change negotiations, in order to break the current political impasse between developed and developing countries. It is worthwhile China considering these political commitments either on its own or through a joint statement with U.S. and other major countries, provided that a number of conditions can be worked out. These commitments are principles, and still leave flexibility for China to work out details as international climate change negotiations move on. But in the meantime, they signal well ahead that China is seriously committed to addressing climate change issues, alleviate, if not completely remove, U.S. and other industrialized country’s concerns about when China would get in, an indication that the whole world has long awaited from China, help U.S. to take on long-expected emissions commitments, and thus pave the way for reaching an international climate agreement at Copenhagen.

This paper can be downloaded at the URL:
 http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15587/1/F… or

 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?a…

==================

The East-West Center originated as a University of Hawaii at Manoa faculty initiative with a February 16, 1959 memo from art professor Murray Turnbull, then acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, to political science professor Norman Meller, then chairman of the faculty senate, that proposed the creation of a International College of Cultural Affairs, but University of Hawaii President Laurence Snyder said budgetary constraints prevented proceeding at the time with such a bold idea.

Two months later, following radio reports of an April 16, 1959 speech in Washington, D.C. by then Sen. Lyndon Johnson (D-TX) that proposed the creation of an international university in Hawaii “as a meeting place for the intellectuals of the East and the West,” history professor John Stalker and Meller urged President Snyder to respond at once to Johnson’s suggestion. With the prospect of federal funding, President Snyder appointed a faculty committee chaired by Turnbull to rapidly prepare a substantive proposal for creating an international college.

On June 9, 1959, Sen. Johnson introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to establish an educational center in Hawaii to provide for “cultural and technical interchange between East and West,” with a companion bill introduced in the U.S. House by Delegate John A. Burns (D-T.H.); the Mutual Security Act of 1959, signed by U.S. President Eisenhower on July 24, 1959, called on the State Department to study the idea and report back to Congress by January 3, 1960.

On May 14, 1960, President Eisenhower signed the Mutual Security Act of 1960 which authorized the creation of a Center for Cultural and Technical Interchange Between East and West (East-West Center) at the University of Hawaii, and on August 31, 1960 signed the Department of State Appropriation Act, 1961, which appropriated $10 million for the Center (including $8.2 million in capital spending for six new buildings), and on September 30, 1961, President Kennedy signed Supplemental Appropriation Act, 1962, which appropriated an additional $3.3 million for the Center.

On October 25, 1960, the University of Hawaii signed a grant-in-aid agreement with the State Department to establish and operate the East-West Center, and received its first installment of $1.1 million in federal funding on November 8, 1960. University of Hawaii art professor Murray Turnbull served as interim director and acting chancellor of the East-West Center through 1961,  when anthropologist Alexander Spoehr, the former director (1953–1961) of the Bernice Pauhi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, was appointed as the East-West Center’s first chancellor, serving for two years before resigning at the end of 1963.  University of Hawaii president Thomas H. Hamilton served as acting chancellor of the East-West Center for a year and a half from January 1964–June 1965.  In July 1965, he was succeeded by former newspaper publisher and diplomat Howard P. Jones, the former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia (1958–1965),  who served as chancellor for three years before being succeeded in August 1968 by linguist Everett Kleinjans, the former vice president of International Christian University in Tokyo, who had lived in Asia for sixteen years.

On May 9, 1961, then U.S. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was a guest at groundbreaking ceremonies for the East-West Center’s first six buildings

On the road to Copenhagen, the real markings are in Washington and Beijing - we told you so before. Now, to make it interesting to the public, here in the US we turn it into drama. Some more clever ones turn it - so they think - into advertisement and profits.

Just see what five local Burger King franchises did right now in Memphis, Tennessee. They put up on their billboards - CLIMATE CHANGE IS BALONEY. I thought they were trying to sell baloney - but it turned out they actually were selling hamburgers. Did the sales increase? Will the newspaper that did not do justice to the topic earlier increase its sales now?

———-

U.S., China face complex climate negotiations - China and U.S. Seek a Truce on Greenhouse Gases.

WASHINGTON — For months the United States and China, by far the world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, have been warily circling each other in hopes of breaking a long impasse on global warming policy.

They are, as President Obama’s chief climate negotiator puts it, “the two gorillas in the room,” and if they do not reach some sort of truce, there is no chance of forging a meaningful international treaty in Copenhagen later this year to restrict emissions.

As a senior American team arrived in Beijing on Sunday for climate talks, the standoff was taking on the trappings of cold-war arms control negotiations, with gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions replacing megatons of nuclear might as a looming risk for people across the globe.

Both sides are demanding mutually assured reductions of emissions that are, in the current jargon, “measurable, verifiable and reportable.” In the background hover threats of great retaliation in the form of tariffs or other trade barriers if one nation does not agree to ceilings on emissions.

“This is going to be one of the most complex diplomatic negotiations in the history of the world,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, co-sponsor of an energy bill being debated in the House, who just returned from a week in China.

Many take the simple fact that the two nations, jointly responsible for more than 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, are even talking seriously to each other about the issue as a propitious sign after years of mutual distrust.

But there is cause for profound skepticism as well. The Chinese continue to resist mandatory ceilings on their emissions and are making financial and environmental demands on the United States that are political roadblocks.

The United States, despite optimistic words from the White House and Congress, has yet to enact any binding targets on greenhouse gas emissions. The energy bill now before Congress proposes emissions targets that are far short of what China and other nations say they expect of the United States.

Compounding the difficulty is the fact that both countries are struggling economically and the Chinese and American publics appear far more interested in jobs than in tackling environmental problems, a task that would necessarily be costly.

The main product of the discussions with Beijing so far has therefore been agreement to hold more discussions.

Yet the clock is ticking. Only six months remain before the opening of United Nations-sponsored talks in Copenhagen to produce a climate change treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

Without the full participation of the United States and China, most negotiators believe that any agreement is doomed to fail. Congress and two American presidents refused to accept the Kyoto accord, which expires in 2012, because it imposed no pollution limits on China or other developing countries. The American refusal to ratify the treaty and the lack of participation by China and other developing nations have left the pact all but toothless.

“China may not be the alpha and omega of the international negotiations, but it is close,” said Todd D. Stern, the top American climate negotiator at the three-day talks in Beijing. “Certainly no deal will be possible if we don’t find a way forward with China.”

The Obama administration has pledged to be a leader in the talks that culminate in December in Copenhagen, although it is far from clear that Congress has the will to approve emissions targets and furnish enough aid to developing countries to satisfy the Europeans, Chinese, Indians, Brazilians and other major participants. Mr. Stern described the demands from China and other countries as “not serious,” and said the United States was “jumping as high as the political system will tolerate.”

As a measure of how far apart the two nations are, China says the United States should reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The bill before Congress, which could be further weakened, now calls for less than a 4 percent reduction over that period.

The Chinese have begun to consider a series of unilateral actions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, stepping up production of renewable electricity and increasing the efficiency of their manufacturing, buildings and vehicles. But Beijing insists it will not sacrifice China’s economy to meet the demands of outsiders, particularly those in the developed world that are responsible for the vast majority of human-caused carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.

“What they are saying right now is, ‘We can do a lot of things, but we don’t want to commit to any targets,’ ” said Jin Jiaman, executive director of the Global Environmental Institute, based in Beijing, which has helped pave the way for the current talks. “They want to preserve their right to develop.”

One of China’s senior climate negotiators, Su Wei, has said that although China will not accept absolute limits on its emissions, officials have begun to consider putting in place domestic targets to significantly reduce the carbon intensity of the country’s heaviest-emitting industries. Under the current official five-year plan, China is trying to reduce the amount of energy emitted per unit of gross domestic product by approximately 20 percent by 2010, a goal it may or may not meet. Some experts question the accuracy of China’s official reports, and say it will be impossible to monitor the nation’s progress without a better system for tracking greenhouse gas pollution.

In a tough speech in Washington last week, Mr. Stern said that such modest reductions would do little to affect atmospheric concentrations of climate-altering gases. He also noted that China emitted four times as much carbon dioxide as the United States and six times as much as the European Union or Japan for every unit of gross domestic product.

“China and other developing countries do not need to take the same actions that developed countries are taking,” Mr. Stern said, “but they do need to take significant national actions that they commit to — internationally — that they quantify, and that are ambitious enough to be broadly consistent with the levels of science.”

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, who led a delegation of lawmakers to China at the end of May, said in an interview that she was hopeful about the dialogue between the two countries, but fearful that they would fall into the old trap of hiding behind each other.

“They told us if we’re not going to do something, they’re not going to do anything,” she said. “Some of the people we talked to there said we should do more. I think we should do more, too. But we all have to go down this path together.”

John M. Broder reported from Washington, and Jonathan Ansfield from Beijing.

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.

###

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

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.

CLIMATE CHANGE: U.S., China Seek Common Ground
By Matthew Berger

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 3 (IPS) - As the slew of U.S. officials visiting Beijing continued with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s visit this past weekend, it is clear the Barack Obama administration is taking a much more active approach to relations with China than in years past. This shift is probably most clear, and most crucial, in the field of climate change.

Climate change talks continue this week in Bonn ahead of December’s United Nations-sponsored talks in Copenhagen, which will try to determine a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Among the significant changes in the 12 years since the protocol was adopted is the increase in the political will of the U.S. to act on climate change and in the carbon emissions of China.

Together, these two factors mean a U.S.-China bilateral agreement prior to Copenhagen should be both more likely than in previous years and more necessary. The two sides, however, remain far apart.

The U.S. and China are the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, combining for over 40 percent of global carbon emissions. But China’s share has grown feverishly since the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997.

“In 2006, China added enough coal-fired power capacity to emit over 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year for the next 40 years,” Elizabeth Economy, director for Asian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told IPS. “This wipes out the EU’s entire Kyoto reduction commitment of 300 million tonnes.”  Economy says China is the world’s largest emitter of carbon, and “without a dramatic reshaping of its economy, its emissions will be twice those of the United States by 2030.”

Prior to the Obama administration’s dual emphases of working with China and on climate change, the prospect for a serious global agreement to address these issues seemed dim.

This is largely because negotiations between the two countries not only directly impact the rate of climate change but the political arena in which this issue is addressed, as well.

When the U.S. shows it is committed to acting on climate change, a lot pieces fall into place, Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told IPS. And how far the U.S. is willing to go is largely based on how far China goes.

On Capitol Hill you cannot have a debate on climate action without the question being raised of what China is doing, he said. “What is agreed between China and the U.S. will have a huge impact on solving climate issues over the next 10 to 15 years.”

This is also true for countries like India, which is largely seen as being in the same middle ground between developing and industrial as China.

The actions of China might have an even bigger impact on those countries that are less developed than it and India. The Kyoto Protocol included the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” which recognises that the largest shares of greenhouse gas emissions are from industrial countries and that developing countries will likely increase their emissions in order to meet their needs.

It also, however, meant quantitative emissions limits were not placed on developing countries, including China, under the protocol.

Schmidt says he is not sure that the issue of who falls into the category of “developed” and “developing” will get resolved at Copenhagen, but that countries like China and India will clearly be expected to do more than less developed countries, probably with responsibilities that will evolve over time.

“The idea of common but differentiated responsibilities can remain a part of a Copenhagen agreement,” said Economy, “but I think there will be increasing pressure on China to actually assume some responsibilities, even if its cap is not – understandably – as aggressive as that of the United States.”

While visiting China last week with a U.S. congressional delegation, Senator John Kerry remarked that “Copenhagen will be defined by what the U.S. and China agree on in the next few weeks,” calling his discussions with Chinese officials on climate change the “most constructive and productive” he has had with them.

Overall, however, the talks were seen as only minimally productive. China recently released a position paper calling for a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from industrial countries by 2020 and more funding from industrial countries for climate projects in developing projects. It also stressed that “common but differentiated responsibilities” remain a part of any Copenhagen agreement.

According to Economy, China is currently home to 42 percent of all “clean development mechanism” projects, in which industrialised countries invest in greenhouse-gas-reducing projects in developing countries in lieu of reducing their own emissions.

This does mean China is getting funds that might otherwise go to lesser-developed countries. “There are undoubtedly developing countries that feel that China has absorbed more than its fair share of greenhouse gas mitigation assistance,” said Economy.

Ultimately, though, both China and the U.S. made dramatic shifts toward more significant action on climate change since 1997 and in the past couple years.

While China has avoided setting firm targets or timetables for limiting emissions, it has taken action in other ways. It currently has some of the strictest auto emissions standards in the world, strong energy efficiency standards for industry, and is increasing its investment in renewable energy sources.

But these efforts, warns Economy, “act only at the margin in terms of influencing the country’s greenhouse gas emission trajectory.”

Schmidt agrees, but sees hope that U.S. engagement might “push China over the finish line” and into a more sustainable energy future.

And the U.S. has been engaging China fairly heavily since President Obama took office in January – a trend that is far from over. U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern will visit later this month, as will Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

“Within the first six months in office, nearly every Obama cabinet minister will have visited China,” says Schmidt. “Under the Bush administration, [Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulsen and [President George W.] Bush went once or twice.”

“By no stretch of the imagination,” he says, did climate change or China “get the amount of attention they are getting under the Obama administration.”

——————

Above sounds great and promissing  - that by Copenhagen there might be some US-China bilateral agreement to help the Climate Convention from its dead point that was set in Kyoto. So, if there is a good US-China bilateral agreement, Copenhagen as a locale will allow for the rest of the world to join in. In the absence of such a prior US-China agreement, the optimism expressed in the other recent IPS article on the topic of a global climate change agreement as it appears in: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=4… is just so much UN hot air - but if there is a US-China agreement - then let Copenhagen get the flowers.