Futures of the Obama Administration:

Dan Rather says the President must show resolve and steel. This was echoed by Helene Cooper (He must start showing his accomplishments) and Joe Klein (people want to see him crack the whip). Despite this 11 said he must play to the center and only one said he must play to the left.

There is no contradiction here – all agreed that the Democratic base is a varied coalition while the Republican base is the Republican idiosyncratic right (a much less flattering word was used).

So what do the Democrats need now? The answer in the TV and Internet age is that you must be authentic and have a conversation with the broad constituency that is the country.

——–

Helene Cooper reminded us that in Foreign countries Obama did very well – now he will have a huge welcome in Indonesia and the Tea Party folks will say that this proves he is not from here. But they may overplay because again the President will show he can raise in the world the essence of an ideal. Indonesia is a poor country in recession and a probable breeding ground for Al Qaeda with a war going on in nearby Philippines.

Joe Klein kept repeating that even in the US people rank Obama’s foreign policy much more then his economic policy – so some will say that when he goes overseas to take of the news the needed US internal economic policy – he does not face the economy.

But above is not correct – he actually goes to the energy markets – Indonesia, then India, and probably after that South Africa. This follows the trip he made to China. So there is a pattern here.

Also – we were reminded that Iran has an operation to extract Uranium in a remote location in Venezuela – and yes – there is now a daily flight from Tehran to Caracas while there is only a weekly flight from Caracas to Bogota. AHA – is this not what we say all the time since Copenhagen? Obama needs to have in the White House a clear Western Hemisphere desk in order to be able to do all these other needed activities that are mainly Asia oriented.

We learned that Rahm Emanuel – the White House pragmatist – said all the time – the futures are ENERGY and JOBS. That should have been the laser guided policy from day one.

On the Israeli Palestinian issue, with the latest misery for all to see and a consensus building that the killing in Dubai and the slap to Vice President Biden, were “botched-on-purpose” events. Simply – they are so botched that they must have been on purpose and the purpose was that Israel wanted the world to know that they are ready to take responsibility for their future because they do not want to have to pay for complicated world policies that may treat them as collateral.

The two issues with most impact on the Middle East are clearly the global look into the maze of State-to State energy policies and what seems to emerge – a border set between Israel and the West Bank run by the Palestinian Authority. This as a “what-can-be-done” approach to get us out of this impasse. With the AIPAC meeting coming up in Washington – March 21-23, 2010, President Obama out of town, and Vice President Biden having been pushed aside by the Israelis, it remains now for Secretary Hillary Clinton to try to build such an approach for the only two direct factors in the dispute, and the Arab States the US has friendly relationship with. If this is not accepted by the two sides, the best the US can do is to drop this topic from its agenda all together, and wait the sides come back begging for new mediation.

Karl Rove is making the rounds of the TV stations in order to sell his book “Courage and Consequences.” It is him, former VP Cheney, the daughter Liz Cheney (Chris Matthews Calls Liz Cheney ‘Daughter of Dracula’), and pundist Bill Krystal that try to reinvent history. Of interest to US foreign policy is the mention now that the mismanagement of the war in Iraq under the Bush-Cheney Administration was the fault of Turkey – because of their reluctance to allow NATO overflights. Quite true – but did not one look into such things when planning a war?

Gillian Tett of the Financial Times, declared that  US President Obama is liked in the world but not feared. Russia and China are not going to allow greater restrictions on Iran. She also said that Israel is probably not as fearful of Iran as it is assumed because had they had Iran in mind they would not have turned against the US and the UK the way they did. She thinks the events in Dubai were a clear provocation to the UK. France and the UK will go along with the US grudgingly on Iran but others at the UN Security Council, like Lebanon and Brazil will not.

Candy Crowley’s program was underlined with the idea that the gridlock in Washington on health-care has signaled to the world that it also carries no power overseasand that Obama will now stress in his relations to Congress what he already said: “Ignore the Washington Eco Chamber!”

————-

Pakistan turns into a US Administration’s Show-case: At least something that showed some changes for the better.

On Farred Zakaria with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke – “Pakistan is looking up – A victory for Obama. It helped by dangling of showers of aid – so the Hakami faction of the Taliban that was previously tolerated by the military is now being attacked.

Holbrooke finds that the Afghans in Khandahar and Marja in general, want a conservative society but no corruption. They want education including for girls and are mad at the Taliban. The district leader in Marja is an Afghan who returned from Germany. There are returnees and the US encourages also afghans in the US to return and participate in the rebuilding.

———–

With Fareed – The Jeffrey Sachs, Amity Schlaes (conservative formerly with The Wall Street Journal and presently Council of Foreign Relations specialist), and Christa Freeland (global editor-at-large, The Financial Times – middle of the road, right leaning):

The underlying Jeff Sachs dictum: “EVERY DECENT SOCIETY ENSURES CITIZENS HAVE ACCESS TO HEALTH-CARE.” Without reforms of the health-care delivery system we will get nowhere – this was really not discussed yet he said.

The problem is that we have no cost controls so we use four times more Cat-Scans then Switzerland or France.

Freeland concurred  and said THE SYSTEM ENCOURAGES DOCTORS TO DO TOO MUCH! She had found that in the American system you have to fight excessive treatment more then anywhere else. She herself gave birth in Toronto, Paris, New York and the US was worse. She asked why all those Cesarean treatments for first birth in the US? She concluded that it was not only a problem of greed – which it is – but also a problem of the legal system, the high insurance of the profession, that makes doctors more worried and pushes them to prescribe unnecessary treatments. SO – WE ARE BACK TO THE INSURANCE AND TO THE HEALTH-CARE IMPASSE. She also pointed out that 80% of the health-care cost is in the last years of life and this should be something to be looked at also.

The two seemed to agree that with 10% unemployment it is wrong to tie-in health-care to a job – and Freeland suggested HELP RATHER PEOPLE TO BUY AN INSURANCE.

Talking about the economy at large, Jeff Sachs said we were in a panic situation last year – that was removed – but we are out of control with the budget and a burdened debt consumer is no consumer. We risk a downward spiral as for two and a half years we really did nothing on the economy. He predicts that the US is out for a double recession.

Amity Schlaes in all of this was a parody of the Wall Street Journal – “A person who gets a job – not the happy consumer that goes to the mall – is who saves the economy. Which she is obviously right but nowhere in the discussion did we see an indication of how to get there. Cut spending? From where? She brings up Indiana State tax cuts as an example, but Professor Sachs cuts her short by saying the US is already the lowest taxed country in the developed world and we are paralyzed because we cannot do what a civilized country must do. Can we have a value added tax Fareed asks Schlaes and she gives a clear NO!. We read her stuff in the WSJ many times and wonder now what she can do for the Council on Foreign Relations. We thank Fareed Zakaria for having brought her in to the panel so we understand better what US institutions of long-standing have done to split America.

With a 10% of GNP budget gap while the entitlement amount to a total of 15% for Social Security and existing Health-Care, there is just no way that the US can cut itself out of the coming recession without falling back into the ranks of a third world country – whatever the meaning of that term which we clearly do not accept as part of our own parlance. Clearly – Presidential leadership is needed here and plain conversation with the electorate is the way to honestly explain the situation to the public. Do not expect the media to be able to do this public relations job.

David Axelrod on all channels, kept saying that Illinois got 60% insurance increases this year and the President will speak in Ohio where a woman wrote to him that she had to chose between health insurance and her home – so she stopped her insurance. Then when cancer struck – now she will lose her home. This is the biggest driving force of the economy that the Federal Government must take into consideration first. We say power to him.

Further, on Fareed Zakaria’s program, we learned that March 9th was a year since the Wall Street Dow Index hit bottom from which it climbs up again. Banks have recapitalized with new $150 billion to a safe position, managers make fabulous pay again, Timothy Geithner who took the country on a middle road has shown success, refusing to nationalize the banks, but what did this do to the person on main street who will be voting in November?

———-

Intricacies of the Arab and Islamic world:

On the Amanpour program we started with Sheikh Dr. Tahir Ul-Qadri – an Islamic Theologian from London who started the JIHAD-AGAINST-JIHAD movement. He was a former special advisor on Islamic Law to the Pakistani Supreme Court.

He says – No ifs – No buts – Terrorism is Terrorism. Any good intentions cannot allow terrorism.

A terrorist does not reach Shihada (martyrdom) or in lay language – he does not go to heaven – he rather goes to hell!

He was questioned about “Khawarij” in the “Hadit” – the words of the Prophet as reported by men that wrote them down – “whoever fights against the people (that is the believers) has more rights to Allah then others.”

Sheikh Ul Qadri answered that the ideology that says those that are not Muslims – their blood is allowed – he does no accept. He fights for peace and when asked if his life is in danger he said he is not afraid “one has to live for truth and die for truth” – he is thus a jihadist-against jihad.

Elias Khouri is an Arab lawyer living on the West Bank near Jerusalem. Both – his father and his son were killed by other Palestinians as part of their war against Jews. The father back in the pre-Israel days, the son, George Khouri, who went to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in March 2004, when he was mistaken for a Jew.

Elias Khouri paid from his money for the translation into Arabic of the book “A Tale of Love and Darkness” by the famed Israeli author Amos Oz, and had it published in Beiruth so that Arab readers can learn something about the Israelis. This bereaved person wants to help remove prevailing stereotypes in the Middle East.

Amos Oz who can be defined as an Israeli who clearly wants to live in a Middle East mixed environment, depicted in this book the non-heroic ways of the first settlers who lead to the foundation of the State. Elias Khouri says that knowledge is needed to be able to understand if we want to fight them or go along. Since the offer to translate the book, the two families – the Khouri and the Oz families became close friends and visit each other. Amos Oz says that he tried always to put himself in the other’s shoes. Anyone in the Arab world who reads the book will understand the historical events better. Oz says – Imaging the other is a moral thing.

 http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/11/15…

Posted on Thursday, March 11, 2010 in THE OPPENHEIMER REPORT.

The Miami Herald’s Andres Oppenheimer shares his opinion on Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva’s consideration to run for secretary general of the UN.

BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER
 AOPPENHEIMER at MIAMIHERALD.COM
A short news item in Brazil’s news magazine Veja this week suggested that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is considering running for United Nations secretary general after he leaves office at the end of this year. If true, that would explain a lot of things.

Until now, the conventional wisdom was that Brazil’s recent foreign policy of open support to the world’s most ruthless dictatorships – IRAN – is tied to the country’s emergence as a new power in the world economy, and its desire to flex its muscle as a new — and fiercely independent — player in international affairs.

That’s probably true. But the Veja report — stating that Lula “has been sounded out by more than one person to be a candidate for U.N. Secretary General in 2011” — is adding a new element to the puzzle of what’s behind Brazil’s foreign policy. The Brazilian government says it will not comment on the magazine’s report.

Diego Arria, a former chairman of the U.N. Security Council, told me that “Lula would be a very strong candidate because of Brazil’s weight as an increasingly independent power, and because of his international prestige.” He added that Lula may be catering to an anti-U.S. climate at the United Nations “to position himself as a strong candidate for Secretary General.”

In recent days, Lula has made some shocking statements that are hard to understand coming from a former union leader who opposed military dictatorships. In an interview with The Associated Press, he compared Cuba’s peaceful oppositionists who are waging hunger strikes with “bandits.”

Lula, who recently visited Cuba and posed smiling with that country’s military dictator Gen. Raúl Castro shortly after political prisoner Orlando Zapata died from a hunger strike, said that hunger strikes should not be used “as a pretext” to defend human rights. Lula added, “Imagine if all bandits who are imprisoned in Sao Paulo went on a hunger strike and demanded freedom.”

Days earlier, Lula had reiterated his decision to visit Iran in May, despite international efforts to impose sanctions on that country amid growing evidence that its regime is building nuclear weapons in defiance of international rules.

Does Lula have a chance of becoming U.N. Secretary General? Most diplomats say current Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, a South Korean diplomat whose term expires Dec. 31, 2011, is expected to run for reelection. Most of the recent U.N. chiefs serve two consecutive terms.

“Lula’s name would be an honor to Latin America, but it’s a tradition for Secretary Generals to run for reelection, and I don’t see a reason why Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would not go for a second term,” Chile’s U.N. Ambassador Heraldo Muñoz told me.

Others noted that, if for some reason Ban decided not to run, Asian countries may want to have one of their own diplomats at the job for another five years, in keeping with the tradition that each region gets a two-term mandate. And many point out that Lula doesn’t speak English or French, a major obstacle for a candidate to the top U.N. job.

My Opinion: Most likely, Ban will get a second term, even if many countries would want a higher-profile U.N. chief. Lula is more likely to be offered the job of head of the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, whose current director Jacques Diouf of Senegal has been on the job since 1994 and is on his way out.

Lula would be a perfect candidate for that position because of his successful “Bolsa Familia” anti-hunger program in Brazil and the international recognition it has given him. In addition, the FAO has never had a Latin American chief.

Granted, Lula may find that job too small, but — considering his awful human rights stands — it would be the perfect place for him.

———————-

Matthew Russell Lee of The Inner City Press at the UN points out another interesting angle that might explain the Munoz position:

“Meanwhile, press in Latin America and even Chilean Ambassador to the UN Munoz have been speaking of Brazil’s Lula as a possible UN Secretary General in 2012. While many in the UN might wish that this would happen, it is considered impolitic for Munoz, currently seeking an Assistant Secretary General post from Ban Ki-moon, to talk up a competing Lula candidacy.

Others say “ah ha” about the Lula story, thinking this might explain Lula’s schmoozing with Iran and other non favored regimes. What’s next, Lula praising Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa and his blood bath on the beach? Pro Rajapaksa Sri Lankans are expected to demonstrate Friday at noon in front of the UN, echoing the Non Aligned Movements letter claiming that the UN has no human rights mandate.”

———————

Interesting stuff – the Miami Cubans might not like the idea so they try to preemt the trial baloon that was lauched by the Brazilian Veja – and then, if there is a change at the UN in 2012, it can be assumed that the Asians will claim a repeat of what happened when the US has helped ease out Egyptian Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was elected as an African, and brought in then Kofi Annan for a full two terms for Africa. If the UN decides that the MENA group – North Africa and Arab Asia – is indeed a separate region – so above example is not precedent – then there would be no opposition to a prominent Latin American to get the nod. The former East European UN region has pretty much dissolved, so the new MENA or OIC structure will be able to put forward its candidate in due time.

——————

Also, what will be the Obama Administration’s position?

For one thing, the March 21, 2010 trip of the US President to Indonesia and Australia might produce a US backing for an Indonesian to head the UNFCCC – the present opening for Dirctor General under the Climate Change Convention. As of now, the countries that have voiced they will put forward their candidates are South Africa, India, and Indonesia. Brazil has not done so – and above information may indeed allow for this more complicated play with Lula getting in the New York picture later.

Climate science: a peace-studies lesson.

Involves – Civil society Democracy and government International politics;  global security globalisation;  the politics of climate change.

by Paul Rogers, 11 March 2010. OpenDemocracy from the UK.
 http://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers…

The doubters of global warming are emboldened by their new ability – as in the “climategate” affair – to put climate researchers on the defensive. But the experience of comparable assaults on the discipline of peace studies in the 1980s suggests that hostile scrutiny can have longer-term benefits for the target. The author mentions – “The articles in this series try to throw light on recent or current developments in international security. Just occasionally an element of personal experience creeps in. This is one of those.”

The last weeks of 2009 were difficult for the public face of scientific research into global warming. The failure of the climate-change conference in Copenhagen, the identification of minor flaws in the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC’s) published documentation, and the exposure of email exchanges centred on the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at England’s University of East Anglia – all raised doubts about those charged with presenting scientific evidence about climate change and renewing efforts to address the phenomenon. In the case of the email affair – given an extra conspiratorial frisson by being called “climategate” – the careful selection of damaging details by an evidently well-resourced group made it possible to erect a narrative of deception that found an uncritical welcome among climate “sceptics” and “deniers”.

Soon after the furore, Associated Press tasked a team to examine 1,073 emails from the CRU material in order to provide an independent view of what had happened. The result showed no evidence that climate change was faked (see “’ClimateGate’ Doesn’t Show Global Warming Was Faked, AP Reports”, Huffington Post, 12 December 2009); but amid a deluge of negative comment this attracted little attention, and the impression persists that the whole case for human-induced climate change has been severely hit.

For many of the researchers involved, the period of late 2009-early 2010 has been traumatic; they may have had to contend with controversy over the years, but this is something outside their experience.

The intensity of the coverage, and the zealotry of many sceptics in pressing their case, stem in part from changing global circumstances. There has long been deep opposition to any international move towards a low-carbon economy, from reasons both ideological (free-market true-believers) and commercial (the more retrograde transnational corporations, especially fossil-fuel companies). There was no great risk of such a move as long as George W Bush was in the White House; but the election of Barack Obama and the prospect of Copenhagen agreeing a successor to the Kyoto protocol made 2009 potentially a dangerous year. In this context, “climategate” has been a gift.

The peace benefit

The lesson of my own experience in the 1980s suggests that the longer-term impact might be rather different from what the architects of this affair intend. I got into working in the field of international security from teaching environmental science and resource-conflict at Huddersfield Polytechnic, west Yorkshire, in the early 1970s (and recently came across some of my thirty-five-year-old lecture notes dealing with rising atmospheric CO² levels!). I moved to Bradford’s department of peace studies at the end of the decade, just as the cold war was entering a particularly tense period; from around 1980 onwards, several of us there saw the need for independent research and writing on nuclear issues.

An early outcome (with co-authors Malcolm Dando and Peter van den Dungen) was a book about the risks and consequences of nuclear war: As Lambs to the Slaughter: The Facts About Nuclear War (1981). It struck a chord; 25,000 copies were sold in a few weeks, and that year around 500,000 people purchased an accompanying leaflet published by the environment group Ecoropa.

As Lambs… was part of a wider body of writings, much of it for an academic rather a general readership. This was the case with A Guide to Nuclear Weapons (1981) which ran to several editions and led eventually to a reference work: The Directory of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms and Disarmament 1990. The core purpose of this writing was to be as accurate as possible; this meant (for example) always analysing Soviet as well as western systems and postures, and having a particular focus on the actual consequences of a nuclear war.

What strikes me in retrospect – and when thinking about the problems that climate scientists now face – is how widely varied were the reactions to our work. Military officers, for example, were actually very interested in it and very ready to engage in intensive debates. I was first invited to lecture at the Royal Air Force staff college in 1982 and have continued frequently to lecture at defence colleges to the present day. Senior civil servants in Britain’s ministry of defence were also willing to discuss our work.

The reaction on the political right – then very much in the ascendancy during Margaret Thatcher’s long premiership (1979-1990) – was very different; it was bitter and sustained opposition to what we were doing. In the Thatcherite view of the world, peace studies was “appeasement studies”, indulgent to official enemies and undermining of the nation’s moral fibre. Many articles and pamphlets were written about the Bradford department’s dangerous and subversive nature; one noble member of the House of Lords (the upper chamber of Britain’s parliament) even described us as a “rest home for urban guerrillas”. Some critics preferred a more personal touch: I was called “Dr Death”, and we regularly got abusive mail (which, on one or two occasions, went as far as death-threats).

It was known that Margaret Thatcher wished “something to be done” about peace studies; but this was politically difficult, since universities still retaine considerable independence (a situation that subsequent governments have done much to redress). than now. But the University Grants Committee (UGC) came under pressure to investigate us and to its credit agreed to do so only if Bradford’s vice-chancellor allowed it; he too was prepared to say yes, but – also to his credit – only if the peace-studies staff gave their consent. We certainly would! What followed was the equivalent of today’s “subject review”. It was thorough and exacting, and the UGC made public its verdict – that the department was maintaining high standards.

That outcome lifted the pressure off peace studies for the rest of the 1980s. With the end of the cold war by the end of the decade, much of the other work our staff and research students already did – on peacekeeping, environmental conflict, and mediation, among other issues – came to the fore; this created the foundation for an expansion of our work in the 1990s.

The landscape after battle

How does this relate to “climategate”? A key factor is that we were exposed to intensive criticism and persistent scrutiny of our work virtually from day one, and this in direct consequence made us hugely aware of the need for very high levels of accuracy and impeccable referencing of sources. Access to a wide range of military and defence journals, and a huge amount of information in the public domain, meant that this was actually not so difficult; but under so much external pressure we learned to be very cautious in our analysis at a time when exaggeration on the issues we addressed was common enough.

Many of us now think that the experience made us better academics. If almost everything you write is going to be exposed to detailed examination by relentless and often politically-motivated critics, then you have to set unusually exacting standards for your work. The likely – and beneficial – implication is that climate researchers who have gone through their own test-by-fire will in future take even greater care over published assessments and analyses.

In many ways we were luckier than today’s climate researchers: for there was an intense focus on our peace-studies work from the very beginning – whereas critics of climate science are able to retrieve work published a decade and more ago, when the issue was far less controversial, in order to pinpoint a minor laxity and use it to great effect to damn the whole enterprise.

The overall effect of the setbacks to climate-science’s public face may amount to the loss of a year in the transition to a low-carbon future, but the good work being done in this area offers many grounds for optimism. The New Economic Foundation’s The Great Transition project, and Tim Jackson’s book Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (Earthscan 2009) are but two examples. Alongside the evidence that continues to emerge about the accelerating impact of climate change, the flow of impressive research and compelling argument based on even more rigorous standards will ensure that the refusenik stance will in future become harder to make.

In the end, peace studies was made stronger by those who sought to expose it. In a similar way, the travails of climate researchers may well end up reinforcing the integrity of the science and the necessity of the low-carbon transition.

Jeffrey Ball is Environment Editor and Columnist at  The Wall Street Journal. He covers the issues by pulling in the information from its sources and judges the information’s importance to business.

As  the WSJ describes him – “Jeffrey Ball is The Wall Street Journal’s environment editor. His column, “Power Shift,” appears every other Friday in the paper and chronicles the changing energy and environmental landscape.

Mr. Ball has written about energy and the environment for the Journal for a decade, having covered the oil industry from the paper’s Dallas bureau and the auto industry from the Detroit bureau. His reporting focuses on the economic viability of efforts to change the way society consumes fossil fuels.

He helped create Environmental Capital, the Journal’s daily blog on energy and the environment, and he has appeared on networks including PBS, NPR, CNN and the BBC. Before coming to the Journal in 1996, he worked as a reporter for the Charlotte (N.C) Observer and the Corpus Christi (TX) Caller-Times.

He graduated in 1990 from Yale University, where he majored in history and was editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News.           He lives in Dallas with his wife and two daughters.”

We write the above because we were impressed. – He is a good journalist – he caught on to the implications to business of the uncertainty created by the push against Climate Science and the need to clear up that uncertainty.

He published:

Climate Panel Vows Better Oversight on Research - WSJ.com
Feb 24, 2010 … Write to Jeffrey Ball at  jeffrey.ball at wsj.com …
 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424… We are not sure he was there, but he cut through the nonsense and came up with the essence. We have him take the stage on our website.

Climate Panel Details Its Review Plan: U.N. Appoints Another Global Science Body to Investigate Problems in Now-Controversial 2007 Report on Warming Trend.

By JEFFREY BALL, The Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2010.

The United Nations detailed its plans for an outside review of its beleaguered panel on climate change, amid political reverberations as critics and advocates each jockeyed to use the announcement to their advantage.

The InterAcademy Council, a body representing scientific academies around the world, is to conduct a wide-ranging review of the procedures and management of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The review, to be done by August, comes in response to revelations of questionable behavior and factual errors by some scientists who contributed to the IPCC’s 2007 report, which won a Nobel Peace Prize.

The report called climate change “unequivocal” and “very likely” caused by emissions from human activity.

Robbert Dijkgraaf, co-chair of the InterAcademy Council, said in an interview that a particularly delicate task will be to pick who participates in the review. The council needs people who have knowledge of climate science but aren’t too close to the IPCC: “Clearly you cannot be the reviewer and the reviewed at the same time,” he said. But people involved in previous IPCC reports could serve on the review committee, he said.

The council was set up in 2000 to advise international institutions such as the U.N. and the World Bank. The IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, participated in a previous council report on energy issues, but Mr. Dijkgraaf said that wouldn’t compromise the council’s objectivity.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has made climate change one of the top priorities of his tenure. Mr. Ban took no questions Wednesday and didn’t directly address trhe future of Mr. Pachauri, who has faced calls to resign. But the two stood together at the U.N. podium and Mr. Ban was supportive.

“Regrettably, there were a very small number of errors” in the panel’s 2007 report, Mr. Ban said. “Remember, this is a 3,000-page synthesis of complex scientific data. I have seen no credible evidence that challenges the main conclusions of that report.” In an interview Wednesday, Mr. Pachauri said he would “certainly not” resign.

Critics of proposed greenhouse-gas regulations in the U.S. have begun using questions about the IPCC as their latest ammunition. Peabody Energy Co., one of the country’s major coal producers, filed a petition last month with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s move to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions because it relies on IPCC determinations.

The EPA said in a statement that it is confident its move will withstand legal challenge. “The question of the science is settled,” the agency said.

The IPCC expressed “regret” earlier this year that its 2007 report erroneously claimed that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. The report also said inaccurately that about half of the Netherlands sits below sea level. IPCC leaders, including Mr. Pachauri, say an independent review is needed to try to restore public confidence in the panel.

The InterAcademy Council’s board is likely to elect members to its review committee on March 22, Mr. Dijkgraaf said. He said the committee probably will include some people who have little exposure to climate science, but have expertise in issues such as quality control of data and use of non-peer-reviewed literature. The report will go through the council’s board, which consists largely of presidents of national science academies.

“Scientific reputations will rest on this, and if it can be shown the science was sloppy, their stars will fall,” said scientific ethicist Thomas M. Powers, director of the Science, Ethics, and Public Policy Program at the University of Delaware, speaking of those involved in the IPCC report. “Apart from divining rods, the best we can do is get the smartest people in the world, the people who know science, and ask them to review their peers.”

Environmentalists said that they hoped the review would quiet criticism of the IPCC. It should “restore public confidence that has been shaken by an aggressive campaign to sow confusion about climate science,” said a statement by Peter Frumhoff, who helped to write the 2007 report and is director of science and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, who is among those calling for Mr. Pachauri’s resignation, on Wednesday said that the U.S. “cannot afford to continue to base our energy and environmental policies on contaminated U.N. data.”

The InterAcademy Council will probe, among other things, the IPCC’s guidelines for using non-peer-reviewed literature in its reports, how to ensure the IPCC considers a “full range of scientific views,” and how it corrects any errors in its reports once detected, Mr. Dijkgraaf said, The council also will “look at the management of the IPCC,” he said.

Neither the U.N. nor the IPCC will “exercise any control” over the study by the InterAcademy Council, Mr. Dijkgraaf said.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A10.

Have Fuel Cells Finally Turned the Corner?
Now by Darren O’Dowd, Manager, Smart Grid, March 10, 2010.
Sunnyvale, California-based Bloom Energy, founded in 2001, was one of the feature stories on the February 21 edition of CBS Television’s “60 Minutes.” The subject of the story was the public unveiling of the Energy Server™, which is refrigerator-sized generating units containing solid oxide fuel cells. Bloom Energy claims that this type of advanced fuel cell holds greater potential for real distributed generation applications than its predecessors due to its use of lower cost ceramic materials as well as due to a breakthrough in engineering design challenges that previously hindered the development of solid oxide fuel cells.

The Energy Server™, according to the Bloom Energy web site, is “fuel flexible,” able to run on Natural Gas, or on renewable bio-fuels. Each one has a generation capacity of 100 kilowatts (kW), and the servers can be deployed modularly to provide greater generation capacity if needed (a Bloom Energy press release from February 24 details modular deployments of 400 kW and two deployments of 500 kW).

One of the most unique and remarkable elements of this public “debut” is that it is nothing of the sort from a production and operational standpoint. Bloom Energy, on its web site and in press releases, already counts such prominent companies as Bank of America, Coca-Cola, eBay, FedEx, Google, Staples, and Walmart as its customers with already installed and operating servers. Among the uses cited for the Energy Servers™ are replacements for on-site diesel generators (typically for back up or peak time period generation) and replacement of traditional grid-delivered power, including for the purpose of reducing these companies’ respective greenhouse gas emissions/carbon footprints through the use of bio-gas as fuel.

However, amid the hype and buzz generated from the “60 Minutes” story and subsequent public unveiling of the Energy Server™ on February 24th, many questions remain as to whether or not this new offering is the “game-changer” that, to date, in regard to fuel cells, has been more promise than delivery. The Energy Server™ was developed largely in secret since Bloom Energy’s founding in 2001, with no substantive information on the product coming from the company until last month’s public coming-out party. Bloom Energy’s headquarters are a non-descript office building in Sunnyvale with no signage indicating their presence there.

Furthermore, while most often such new technologies are tested in cooperation/collaboration with the utility industry, Bloom Energy chose not to do so with the Energy Server™ at least not that is publicly known. A representative from The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) declined specific comment to a blog posting for the Wall Street Journal, indicating that, “we haven’t had access to it.” Therefore it is unclear how the server will function if interconnected to the grid in a net-metering scenario (similar to what’s happening now in many jurisdictions with smaller Solar PV distributed generation). It’s also unclear how exactly the Energy Server™ would function in residential areas, as its capacity would dictate its deployment at the sub-station level.

Finally, there are many questions as to the specific costs associated with obtaining and operating the Energy Server™. Bloom Power’s web site mentions a 3-5 year payback model on owning the server, but the company has not publicly gone into any further detail on the costs of ownership. Any deployment at a “utility level” will likely attract the attention of and possibly require the approval of regulators, at which point the cost in comparison to other generation resources, renewable or otherwise, will come into play.

Despite these (and probably others not explored here) open questions, Bloom Energy and the Energy Server™ merit our industry’s interest and attention going forward. The fact that they have a deliverable product already being used in the market speaks volumes as to how far fuel cells have come from promise to reality.

———–

We think that the questions in above article are basically irrelevant – this because we hope the Bloom-boxes will develop a new decentralized market that is not based on the grid. In our best dreams we envision them make the grid itself a thing of the past – so that the present investment push for smart grid will have to be reconsidered.

Fiancé of Neda, Iran’s Slain ‘Angel of Freedom,’ Heading to Geneva Rights Summit.

THE UPDATE:   www.unwatch.org

02 March 2010

Fiancé of Neda, Iran’s Slain ‘Angel of Freedom,’ Heading to Geneva Rights Summit – Caspian Makan to protest Iranian government brutality.

GENEVA, March 2, 2010 – One day after Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the UN in Geneva that President Ahmadinejad’s June election was “an exemplary exhibition of democracy and freedom,” Caspian Makan, the fiancé of slain Iranian icon Neda Agha Soltan, announced today that he will join other world-famous dissidents as a speaker at next Monday’s Geneva Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy, co-organized by UN Watch, Freedom House, Ibuka and more than 20 other human rights NGOs.

Images of Neda’s bloody killing in June at the hand of the Basij paramilitary force turned an international spotlight on the brutality of the Iranian government crackdown against peaceful protesters.

The Tehran regime banned prayers for Neda in the country’s mosques, arresting anyone who held a vigil for her. Mr. Makan was then arrested and detained at Evin Prison in Tehran. He was beaten and pressured to sign a false confession.

Since his release, Mr. Makan has been an outspoken dissident for freedom in Iran, spreading Neda’s story and message around the world.

The Geneva conference is organized by a global civil society coalition of 25 human rights groups, including Burmese, Tibetan and Zimbabwean organizations (see list below), with support from the Canton of Geneva.

The two-day schedule features more than 20 action-oriented presentations and skills-building workshops, with the objective of advancing internet freedom, the struggle of dissidents against state repression, and reform of the 47-nation UN Human Rights Council.

Speakers will include former political prisoners from around the world, including Rebiya Kadeer, champion of China’s Uighur minority and Nobel Peace Prize nominee; Nestor Rodriguez Lobaina, Cuban dissident; Bo Kyi, Burmese dissident, winner of the 2008 Human Rights Watch Award; Donghyuk Shin, survivor of North Korean prison camps; and Phuntsok Nyidron, the Buddhist nun from Tibet who served 15 years in jail for recording songs of freedom.

The Geneva Summit will also feature eminent governmental and intergovernmental advocates for human rights, including Massouda Jalal, the former Afghan Minister of Women Affairs and first female presidential candidate; MP Irwin Cotler, Canadian human rights hero and former counsel to Nelson Mandela; Italian MP Matteo Mecacci, OSCE Parliamentary Assembly Rapporteur for democracy and human rights; and Jan Pronk, former Special Representative in Sudan of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Last year’s summit, covered by CNN, AP, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal, brought together former political prisoners Saad Eddin Ibrahim of Egypt, Ahmad Batebi of Iran, José Gabriel Ramón Castillo of Cuba and Soe Aung of Burma, along with many other well-known rights activists and scholars. (See videos at http://genevasummit.org/videos.)

Admission to the March 8-9, 2010 conference is free, and the public and media are invited to attend. For accreditation, program and schedule information, please visit http://genevasummit.org/.

Visit the site during the conference to follow the live webcast, blog and Twitter feed.

Global Civil Society Coalition

Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma

Centro para la Apertura y el Desarrollo de América Latina (CADAL)

Darfur Peace and Development Center

Directorio Democratico Cubano

Fondation Genereuse Development

Freedom House

Freedom Now

Genocide Watch

Global Zimbabwe Forum

Human Rights Activists in Iran

Human Rights Without Frontiers Int’l

IBUKA

Ingénieurs du monde

Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children

International Federation of Liberal Youth (IFLRY)

International Campaign to End Genocide

International Association of Genocide Scholars

Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme

LiNK

Respekt Institut

Stop Child Executions

Tibetan Women’s Association

UN Watch

Zimbabwe Advocacy Office

###

“Giving Iran Seat on U.N. Rights Council Would Legitimize Its Brutality,” Says Boyfriend of Killed Protest Icon

Patrick Goodenough
March 10, 2010

An Iranian whose fiancée’s death by gunfire became a symbol of opposition to the regime during post-election protests last year made an impassioned appeal Tuesday for Tehran to be denied a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council in elections this spring.

Caspian Makan addresses the Geneva Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy, co-organized by UN Watch and 24 other human rights NGOs, Tuesday, March 9, 2010. Click here for full transcript of his remarks Click here to watch video

Addressing a gathering of dissidents and human rights advocates in Geneva, Caspian Makan, a photojournalist who fled Iran late last year after being detained for more than 60 days, said Iranian membership in the U.N.’s top human rights body would be a “slap in the face” of other members.

It would encourage other countries that have a tendency to flout human rights and undermine the credibility of the U.N. and the council, he said, according to a translation provided by event organizers.

“I feel furthermore that if the Iranian regime became a member, that would legitimize the inhuman and cruel acts the regime has perpetuated against its population,” Makan added. “Giving it legitimacy would encourage them to go further still.”

The U.N. has confirmed that Iran has submitted in writing its candidacy to become a member of the HRC.

On May 13, the General Assembly will vote by secret ballot to fill 14 of the Geneva-based council’s 47 seats. Iran and four other countries – Thailand, Qatar, Malaysia and the Maldives – will compete to fill four available seats set aside for the Asian regional group.

Makan was speaking Tuesday at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy, a two-day event that brought together some 500 people from more than 60 countries, to discuss issues organizers say are mostly neglected by the HRC.

He told the gathering about Neda Agha Soltan, the 26-year old “deep thinker” and “artist at heart” with whom he had fallen in love after meeting her on a trip.

Makan, 38, said they had tended in the past not to vote in elections because they were seen as a charade, and taking part would be seen as “participating in the regime to some extent.”

But the 2009 election had seemed to offer in the shape of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi a “lesser evil” for young Iranians who “above all else wanted to get rid of Mr. [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad.”

Once it became clear that the election was rigged in favor of the incumbent, he said, Soltan had joined the protests.

Makan said that while trying to do his job he was an eyewitness to the violent clampdown by “the mercenaries of the regime” and “saw firsthand that the army of the revolution was shooting and killing the demonstrators from a helicopter.”

Four days before she died, he had urged Soltan to keep away from the demonstrations. “She said, ‘You know Caspian, I love you, I love being with you, but what is most important to me is the freedom of our people.”

On June 20, Soltan was shot in the chest on a Tehran street, apparently by a Basij militia sniper. Amateur video footage capturing the moments after the shooting was posted online and seen around the world.

“We have seen many people who have been wounded and killed, but this struck the world particularly hard,” Makan said of his fiancee’s death.

“We were able to see in the footage how good and kind she was and admire her attitude when faced with death, to admire her courage as a symbol of liberty, as she died hoping for a better life for the millions of Iranians who remained behind.”

Human rights researchers say at least 40 Iranians died during June and that the number more than doubled in the months that followed. The official figure stands at 44.

Last month, Mahmoud Abbaszadeh Meshkini, director-general of Iran’s Interior Ministry – whose functions including policing and overseeing elections – told the HRC that the June 2009 presidential election had been “an exemplary exhibition of democracy and freedom.”

EU Climate Chief delivers Treaty blow.

by Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent
8th March 2010
 http://crazationsice.blogspot.com/2010/0…

The world will almost certainly fail to draw up a new treaty on climate change this year, the minister in charge of last year’s Copenhagen summit has admitted, delivering a heavy blow to the barely flickering hopes for a swift global settlement.

Connie Hedegaard, the Danish minister who masterminded the summit of world leaders on global warming last year and is now the European commissioner for climate change, told the Financial Times negotiations were not progressing fast enough for a treaty to be signed soon.

She also gave warning that pushing too hard for a treaty this year could be counterproductive.

“To get every detail set in the next nine months looks very difficult,” she said. “Europe would love that to happen, and I would love that to happen . . . but my feeling is that it is going to be very difficult to get a treaty.”

Her pessimism echoed that of the outgoing United Nations climate change chief, Yvo de Boer. He told the FT as he resigned last month after four years of seeking an agreement that he could not see a treaty being signed this year.

The admission also comes against the backdrop of a resurgence of climate change scepticism, fuelled by a series of mistakes made by scientists that have encouraged many politicians to oppose emissions regulation.

Governments had been hoping to forge a final treaty at a global conference this December in Mexico, after failing to do so in Copenhagen.

However, Ms Hedegaard said this was more likely to happen at a follow-up meeting next year in South Africa.

That would still allow governments to meet their self-imposed deadline of forging a new agreement before the end of 2012, when the current provisions of the world’s only existing treaty on greenhouse gas emissions, the 1997 Kyoto protocol, expire.

Ms Hedegaard robustly defended the Copenhagen summit, which attracted loud criticism, especially for the chaotic way in which it finished.

She said that calling world leaders to the long-running negotiations had ensured rapid progress towards the end, when for the first time developed and developing countries mutually agreed limits on their emissions.

But she said there would not be another Copenhagen-style summit. “You can do such a thing one time,” she said.

The price of failure, if diplomats attempted to force an agreement this year, was too high, Ms Hedegaard said.

“People would say let’s skip that idea, let’s skip the UN thing,” she said.

She also defended climate scientists, saying the handful of flaws in the 2007 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the e-mails in which scientists talked of concealing data did not affect the large body of scientific evidence amassed over decades.

The UN climate talks have been going on since 1992, when world governments signed the first legally binding treaty aimed at avoiding dangerous levels of climate change. The Kyoto protocol failed because it did not impose obligations on developing countries and was rejected by the US.

——————-

Connie Hedegaard: Statement of CONNIE HEDEGAARD, European Commissioner for Climate Action, on the creation of the Directorate-General CLIMATE “The DG CLIMATE has been created …
ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/hedegaard/index_en.htm

We picked up some ideas from Katie McCaskey of an aol blog – http://www.housingwatch.com/2010/02/19/kill-your-lawn-earn-some-green/

Katie pointed out that Southern California residents have  now further good financial reasons for doing sane things and rip out their water-wasting turf – did you hear that they will get even a check in the mail?

These programs were instituted by Southern California utilities because of water shortage and above triggered my memory of things past that occured when I tried to do sane things in New York State and found that one must bow to the conventional narrow minds running the system.

In Southern California homeowners are now required to replace grass with drought-tolerant, native plant species or install permeable surfaces which filter water back into the ground. Common permeable surfaces that are allowed include:  flagstone, brick, and gravel. The rebate is $1 per square foot, up to a maximum of 2,000 feet.

Cyberhomes blogger Marcie Geffner writes:
The rebate might not be enough to persuade homeowners who really love their lawns. But for me, the offer was a no-brainer as I wanted to replace my big boring lawns with flagstone walkways, cactus and other plants that are more natural to the climate, if not necessarily native.

Other water-saving rebates available through LADWP include incentives to replace toilets and clothes washers with high-efficiency models, timer controlled irrigation, and pressure-reduced sprinkler nozzles. If you’re willing, there is even a rebate for installing synthetic turf.

Kathie McCaskey suggests – “Check with your local utility company or DSIRE.org to see what environmentally-conscious rebates are available in your area.”

If you want to unnerve a European, the revelation of a secret dinner of New York-based hedge funds conspiring against the euro is hard to beat. Europeans are right to worry – but not about the collusion itself. They should be much more concerned that some of the world’s smartest investors are convinced the euro has only one way to go: deep down.

At first sight, this flies in the face of a previous consensus. In Europe, in particular, the predominant view has been that the infidels at the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England will ultimately inflate themselves out of their debt, while the European Central Bank will hold firm. That scenario would be consistent with an overvalued euro.

So what has prompted some sophisticated investors to think the opposite? Greece? Probably not. This is a story about what will happen to the eurozone beyond Greece.

Without political and legal constraints, this would be much easier. The eurozone would prescribe itself a crisis resolution mechanism, a procedure to manage internal imbalances, and perhaps move towards a common eurozone bond. Several economists have made concrete proposals: Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies, and Thomas Mayer, chief economist of Deutsche Bank, have argued the case for a European Monetary Fund. Yves Leterme, the Belgian prime minister, has proposed a European debt agency.

While all of this sounds sensible, none of it may ever happen because of political and legal constraints. Some member states would argue that a new European treaty would be needed to implement such proposals. The route to getting the Lisbon treaty ratified was so tortuous that Brussels would rather go to hell and back than negotiate and ratify another treaty. In any case, German constitutional law imposes such tight constraints that any dilution of the no bail-out clause in the Maastricht treaty or the price stability target of the ECB might trigger a forced German exit. The most one can hope for during the next 10 years is improved voluntary co-ordination in the European Council.

So the question then becomes: what economic adjustment mechanisms are feasible against this political and constitutional backdrop? The options are limited. The one policy response we can almost take for granted will be an attempt to reduce budget deficits back towards the Maastricht treaty’s upper ceiling of 3 per cent of gross domestic product. This will be achieved, if not by 2012, then a year or two later. Meanwhile, Germany has unilaterally prescribed itself a deficit-to-GDP ceiling of 0.35 per cent from 2016. There will be some slippage here as well. But there can be no doubt that the eurozone will try – and probably succeed – to consolidate its fiscal position. The budget committee of the German Bundestag started last Friday, in fact, by cutting the finance minister’s 2010 budget by almost €6bn ($8.2bn, £5.4bn).

If we assume further budgetary consolidation as a given, how then will the eurozone economy adjust? It is an economic fact that the sum of public and private sector balances must equal the current account balance. So forcing up public sector balances implies either an offsetting fall in private sector balances, an offsetting improvement in the current account balance, or some combination of the two.

In scenario one, the eurozone’s current account balance remains broadly unchanged, and all the adjustment comes through a fall in private sector balances. In a similar way, Greece last week solved its fiscal problem by creating a private sector problem of identical size. The Greek state – the sum of its public and private sectors – is just as bankrupt today as it was a week ago. This means that, by following the fiscal policy rules, the eurozone would risk a private sector depression, which would almost certainly be concentrated heavily in Europe’s south. This scenario would greatly increase the probability of a eurozone break-up at some point in the future. Investors who believe in this scenario would be very afraid to hold euros.

In scenario two, all the adjustment comes through the eurozone’s current account balance, which would turn from slightly negative to strongly positive. It is difficult to see how this could be done without a significant further devaluation of the euro. The euro would join the long list of currencies that have seen their problems solved through competitive devaluation. So the consequences would be a significant devaluation of the euro against the dollar and a reversal of its appreciation against sterling. It would make life more difficult for the British. But, most importantly, it would contribute to a resurgence in global imbalances.

Whichever scenario you choose, the euro is going to be weak. Even if the eurozone were to allow more serious slippage in budgetary consolidation than I have suggested, that would probably not help the euro either, as markets would start to doubt the longevity of the currency union for political reasons.

We have always known that a monetary union cannot exist without political union in the long run. Those smart New York investors are betting that the long run is closer than we thought.

munchau@eurointelligence.com

As Berkshire Returns to Form, Buffett Blasts Wall Street.

By SAM GUSTIN
Posted 5:45 PM 02/27/10 Company News, People, Earnings, Berkshire Hathaway

Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), the giant investment and holding company run by legendary investor Warren Buffett, returned to form in 2009, delivering a 20% return to shareholders. Despite a few key missteps and lingering fallout from the recession, the results were strong enough for Buffett to express optimism in his widely read annual letter to investors — and get in a few shots at “reckless” Wall Street executives along the way.

Buffett’s outlook is certainly more positive than it was a year ago — for good reason. During 2009, the company notched its best performance since 2003. Shareholder book value increased 19.8% after falling 9.8% in 2008. Berkshire’s 2009 performance slightly trailed the S&P 500, however, but over the entire financial meltdown the company outperformed that index thanks to a comparatively small 2008 loss.

Blasting Wall Street

Buffett’s letter was a mix of lively — and occasionally pungent — investment philosophy, contrition over Berkshire’s missteps, and condemnation of those Buffett sees as bad actors on the financial stage. In particular, he criticized Wall Street executives and board-members for failing to control risk and then avoiding what he said should have been “severe” consequences. Without naming names, he castigated Wall Street honchos for engineering their own industry’s doom and then shoveling the losses onto investors, all while maintaining lavish lifestyles.

“It has not been shareholders who have botched the operations of some of our country’s largest financial institutions,” Buffett wrote. “Yet they have borne the burden, with 90% or more of the value of their holdings wiped out in most cases of failure. Collectively, they have lost more than $500 billion in just the four largest financial fiascos of the last two years. To say these owners have been ‘bailed-out’ is to make a mockery of the term.”

“The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed,” Buffett continued. “Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style. It is the behavior of these CEOs and directors that needs to be changed: If their institutions and the country are harmed by their recklessness, they should pay a heavy price – one not reimbursable by the companies they’ve damaged nor by insurance.”

Getting Back to Basics: Core Investment Principles

As usual, Buffett reiterated the core investment philosophy that has made him an investing legend, along with longtime partner Charlie Munger: invest in easy-to-understand companies run by honest and talented managers at a good price. Then, nurture those companies and investments over the long-term.

“Charlie and I avoid businesses whose futures we can’t evaluate, no matter how exciting their products may be,” Buffett wrote. “At Berkshire we will stick with businesses whose profit picture for decades to come seems reasonably predictable.”

In a not-so-subtle dig at profligate Wall Street firms that gambled on risky mortgage-based bets and then begged the federal government to save them, Buffett said Berkshire would never rely on taxpayers – or anyone else – for salvation. He has long decried excessive leverage as little more than irresponsible gambling that puts the entire enterprise at risk.

“We will never become dependent on the kindness of strangers,” Buffett wrote. “Too-big-to-fail is not a fallback position at Berkshire. Instead, we will always arrange our affairs so that any requirements for cash we may conceivably have will be dwarfed by our own liquidity.”

Providing, Not Asking, for Aid

To prove his point, Buffett noted that instead of asking for help during the financial crisis, Berkshire actually dispensed aid to others in need — thereby allowing the company to snap up bargain stakes in Goldman Sachs, GE and Harley Davidson.

“When the financial system went into cardiac arrest in September 2008, Berkshire was a supplier of liquidity and capital to the system, not a supplicant,” Buffett wrote. “At the very peak of the crisis, we poured $15.5 billion into a business world that could otherwise look only to the federal government for help.”

Buffett wholeheartedly rejected the short-term investment posture that leads many companies and shareholders to live from one quarter to the next, trading on earnings results and forecasts. “We make no attempt to woo Wall Street,” he wrote.

And he offered a warning he’s given increasingly in recent years: Don’t expect Berkshire to repeat its stunning past performance. As the company has grown it has lost the some of the advantage it had as a smaller, more nimble company, he said.

“The big minus is that our performance advantage has shrunk dramatically as our size has grown, an unpleasant trend that is certain to continue,” Buffett wrote, adding that “huge sums forge their own anchor and our future advantage, if any, will be a small fraction of our historical edge.”

Taking the Blame for Major Missteps

Going forward, Buffett wrote, “we will make plenty of mistakes” — and in his letter, he took clear blame for two major missteps. He called the performance of NetJets, the company’s prized fractional ownership jet unit “the major problem for Berkshire last year.” Buffett has been fond of Netjets, which he, his family, and company board members use frequently.

“In the eleven years that we have owned the company, it has recorded an aggregate pre-tax loss of $157 million,” Buffett wrote. “Moreover, the company’s debt has soared from $102 million at the time of purchase to $1.9 billion in April of last year. Without Berkshire’s guarantee of this debt, NetJets would have been out of business. It’s clear that I failed you in letting NetJets descend into this condition.”

In a characteristic display of humor, Buffett said he had been “bailed out” by David L. Sokol, the Berkshire star who took over as CEO of NetJets last year. “Debt has already been reduced to $1.4 billion, and, after suffering a staggering loss of $711 million in 2009, the company is now solidly profitable,” Buffett wrote. He described Sokol’s leadership as “transforming.”

Buffett was also blunt in blaming himself for last year’s failed experiment to introduce credit cards to Geico customers. “Last year your chairman closed the book on a very expensive business fiasco entirely of his own making,” he said. Buffett had thought that Geico policyholders “were likely to be good credit risks.” But top managers warned him that “instead of getting the cream of GEICO’s customers we would get the – – – – – well, let’s call it the non-cream.”

Buffett says he “subtly indicated that I was older and wiser.” Turns out, he wrote, “I was just older.” Berkshire lost over $50 million on the experiment.

Dealing With the Dangers of Financial Derivatives

Buffett also addressed a topic that has been a growing source of controversy for the company – its use of derivatives, the complex financial products that caused so much havoc during the financial meltdown. Buffett has famously called such products “financial weapons of mass destruction.” How then to explain Berkshire’s use of them? Lack of irresponsible leverage, for starters.

“The dangers that derivatives pose for both participants and society – dangers of which we’ve long warned, and that can be dynamite – arise when these contracts lead to leverage and/or counterparty risk that is extreme,” Buffett explained. “At Berkshire nothing like that has occurred – nor will it. It’s my job to keep Berkshire far away from such problems. Charlie and I believe that a CEO must not delegate risk control. It’s simply too important.”

“At Berkshire, I both initiate and monitor every derivatives contract on our books, with the exception of operations-related contracts at a few of our subsidiaries, such as MidAmerican, and the minor runoff contracts at General Re,” Buffett wrote. “If Berkshire ever gets in trouble, it will be my fault. It will not be because of misjudgments made by a Risk Committee or Chief Risk Officer.”

Who Will Be Buffett’s Successor?

As always, Buffett offered little guidance on his possible successor. (He has famously said that he has the name of his successor in a sealed envelope in his office. He’s also made it clear that he’ll most likely be followed by two managers – one to run Berkshire’s operating businesses and the other to run the investment portfolio.)

One possible hint came in Buffett’s glowing mention of Ajit Jain, the Berkshire superstar who runs the National Indemnity business. “If Charlie, I and Ajit are ever in a sinking boat – and you can only save one of us – swim to Ajit,” he wrote. Buffett also praised Sokol, the intense chief of major Berskshire subsidiary MidAmerican Energy and recently-installed CEO of NetJets, who is also considered one of the top succession candidates.

But as usual, the Oracle of Omaha insists that he “skips to work every morning.” Berkshire’s annual meeting – often called the “Woodstock of capitalism” – will take place on May 1 in Omaha, Nebraska, where the company is headquartered.

from:     sniakan at worldbank.org

date:    Thu, Feb 25, 2010
subject:    World Bank participates in the Africa Carbon Forum

Africa Carbon Forum – March 3-5, Nairobi, Kenya

The World Bank Group is pleased to support the Africa Carbon Forum taking place in Gigiri, right outside Nairobi on March 3-5. Bank staff will be participating in a number of plenary sessions as well as side events.
Furthermore, a press conference will be held on March 3, briefing media on the recently registered Humbo Assisted Natural Regeneration Project. The press conference will take place at 1pm in the UNEP Press Room (Lower Library) in Gigiri – that is the location of the UNEP headqarters near Nairobi. Transportation from downtown Nairobi will be provided.

The Humbo Assisted Natural Regeneration Project is located in Ethiopia and is Africa’s first large-scale forestry project under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). It was recently registered under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The project, developed by World Vision, brings both economic and social benefits to poor communities in Ethiopia as well as environmental benefits, cutting an estimated 880,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next 30 years. The future sales of carbon credits will bring more than US$700,000 to the local communities over ten years.

At the press conference, the National Director of World Vision Ethiopia, Mrs. Tenagne Lemma, will present the project together with Ms. Ellysar Baroudy, the manager of the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund, which is purchasing a share of the carbon credits generated by this project.

For more information, please contact sniakan@worldbank.org by email.

For more information on the World Bank BioCarbon Fund, please see: http://wbcarbonfinance.org/Router.cfm?Pa…

For more information on World Vision, please see: http://www.wvi.org/wvi/wviweb.nsf

For more information on and registration for the Africa Carbon Forum, please see their website: http://www.africacarbonforum.com/2009/en…. Registration is free.

_______________________________________________
Isabel Hagbrink
Senior Communications Officer
Carbon Finance Unit
Environment Department, The World Bank Group
1818 H Street, NW, Washington D.C. 20433

Tel : 202 458 0422 Fax : 202 522 7432
email :  ihagbrink at worldbank.org
Web : www.CarbonFinance.org (See attached file: Africa Carbon Forum Events Booklet external.pdf)

–
From: P F Henshaw <eco@synapse9.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 1, 2010
Subject: The trouble with being good at controlling nature – our healthcare addiction

Philip F. Henshaw sent us the following and we thought it should give us further material for thought and we invite your reaction.

Phil Henshaw writes:

I’ve been looking right at it, studying it deeply, for years.    This week I found another side of the moral quandaries of the healthcare crisis in America that seems to raise it to the scale of the mortal and moral threats we face with the energy crisis, climate change or that loss of bio-diversity.   We’re addicted.    It started with the great early achievements of healthcare, like the universally acclaimed combination of great science and our societal commitment to good works in eradicating Smallpox.

Even the best of solutions, or could I say *especially* the best of solutions, tend to lead people not having foresight into the deepest sort of trouble.   Eradicating Smallpox was greeted as proof we could overcome any great threat of nature, but incidentally also did serve to greatly multiply people and kicked off our great completely unaffordable profit/science healthcare spiral.   That this is what our healthcare crisis is really about sort of just dawned on me.

What makes healthcare an all but incurable growing addiction is the combination of:

1) our being mortal, so the more healthcare we get the more we physically need, and 2) that this has become the last great growth industry for American capitalism.

It combines the economic arts we are most proud of, science, finance, good works and marketing, to create an incurable and unaffordable economic addiction to disease.

That healthcare has become a genuine cancer by multiplying cures and costs toward the exhaustion of the economy, is a true Gordian Knot of moral quandaries rapidly bankrupting everyone.

Has our talent for controlling nature really become incurable?  … destined to overwhelm us with its natural complications?   That very dilemma also seems to be one that nature solves in making literally every perfect thing she makes, though… i.e. that she somehow doesn’t get carried away with limitless problem solving, and is able to make things whole and perfect anyway.

It’s “a long shot”, of course, but this suggests we really need to change.     If we weren’t so busy telling nature how to behave maybe there actually are secrets to find in how she does things worth studying.

Phil Henshaw      ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

NY NY     www.synapse9.com

 http://guest.cvent.com/EVENTS/Info/Summa…

In London – Cleantech Investor Breakfast on Brazil.

Brazil, the fifth largest country in the world, is endowed with extensive natural resources. With an advanced ethanol infrastructure and massive hydro electric capacity, Brazil is a leader in terms of its renewable energy use.

Investment in other renewable energy resources is also growing in interest: the Brazilian government aims to increase wind energy capacity to 10,000 MW over the next decade, taking its share of total energy supply to around 5 percent from 0.4 percent last year. Brazil recently held its first wind auction which resulted in a total of 71 projects signing on to provide 1,800 megawatts of generation capacity.

Demand for biodiesel is being driven by domestic legislation: and there are also investment opportunities in biomass, driven in part by export demand.

Brazil will host the World Cup in 2014 and Rio de Janeiro is the host city for the 2016 Olympics Games. Preparation for these events will involve extensive investment in sustainable infrastructure and will involve opportunities for international investors in fields such as waste to energy.

This event will address some of the investment opportunities opening up in Brazil for UK investors – and will aim to provide a brief overview of the issues involved in doing business in Brazil.

Cleantech magazine is compiling a series of features on cleantech/clean energy investment opportunities in Brazil. The first Brazilian focused issue of the magazine will be presented at the Brazilian breakfast.
The breakfast will be chaired by Paulo Wrobel, who is responsible for Energy and Biofuels at the Brazilian Embassy in London.

INTENDED FOR:

Investors interested in Brazil
Biofuel/biomass companies/investors

UK cleantech companies with products/services appropriate for the Brazilian market

This event is free to attend, but registration is required.

When    Thursday, March 11, 2010 8:00 AM – 11:00 AM

Where:
Rosenblatt Soliciors
9- 13 St Andrew Street
London EC4A 3AF
+44 (0) 20 7955 0880

Planner:    Anne McIvor

Cash for Leaving Oil Underground?

The start of the International Year of Biodiversity has also brought to a head the three-year-long debate on Ecuador’s Yasuni ITT initiative. The initiative centres around the Yasuni national park, one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. It is home to indigenous peoples who have so far been isolated from the outside world—and also to an estimated 800 million barrels of oil. Ecuador is proposing that it will refrain from extracting this oil if the international community pays for half the foregone economic benefits (about 350 million dollars a year). The advantages of the unprecedented initiative are obvious. For one, Ecuador will be able to avoid massive environmental damages and social tensions that have so far resulted from oil exploitation and the unequal distribution of its revenues. And for another, climate-unfriendly oil would remain underground and the forest and its rich biodiversity would be preserved, thereby avoiding about 410 million tons of CO2 emissions. The reasoning behind this idea is that saving the region from economic exploitation is also in the global interest and should correspondingly be compensated for by the international community.

So far Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Belgium have declared that they would be prepared to contribute about half of the stipulated amount. The negotiations on the payment conditions, however, proved to be difficult: disputes include the time frame and the application of the funds. At the beginning of the year President Rafael Correa lost his patience: “We will not submit. Let them know that this country is nobody’s colony. We won’t accept shameful conditions. Keep your money.” As a consequence, his chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Fander Falconi, resigned from office. Correa has now set a deadline for June 2010. If no deal is reached by then, the oil fields will be made available for drilling. Were this to happen, a significant opportunity for greater shared global responsibility and environmental justice would have been frittered away. (Christiane Roettger)

For more information on this topic see http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk… and http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/Natu…

An interview with Ivonne Yanez of Acción Ecológica, an Ecuadorian environmental organization and co-founder of the initiative, is available at http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/11/e…

It is funny how the Chinese cannot take responsibility when they do something right, and the Americans cannot take responsibility when they do something wrong.

Washington bailed out GM rather then making sure first they change products and Beijing stopped companies from buying into the GM misfits but find ways to explain this without harming the feelings of GM. Good riddance to the Hummer monster – specially to the yellow one that used to cruise the New York Mid-town East Side and driven by some chief from the Department of Sanitation.

CHINA INSISTS A FLAWED APPROACH HURT GM DEAL
By Patti Waldmeir in Shanghai 2010-02-26, The Financial Times.

The collapse of General Motors’ plan to sell Hummer to a Chinese buyer reflects flaws in the deal rather than any reluctance by Beijing to sanction cross-border transactions, say Chinese government officials.

GM announced late on Wednesday that it had given up on efforts to sell its troubled Hummer operations to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, after nearly nine months of trying.

The Detroit carmaker said it would now wind down production of the heavy sports utility vehicle.

The collapse marks another difficult sales process for GM since it began to downsize its operations more than a year ago. The carmaker backed out of plans to sell its Opel business last year, while a deal to offload its Saturn brand fell apart.

But it this week succeeded in selling Saab, its Swedish marque, to Spyker, the Dutch boutique sports car maker.

Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, which had never produced a passenger car, said the deal collapsed because it was “unable to obtain clearance [for] the transaction from the Chinese regulators within the proposed deal timeframe”.

The deal’s deadline had already been extended by a month while Tengzhong made a last-ditch effort to obtain Beijing’s blessing.

Analysts said yesterday that Beijing’s refusal to sanction the deal was scarcely surprising, given the central government’s recent strong emphasis on encouraging Chinese consumers to buy smaller, fuel-efficient cars.

To produce the hulking Hummer, with its image of wasteful excess, could hardly be less consistent with Beijing’s pro-green automotive policies, said Mike Dunne of Dunne & Co, an Asia-based automotive consultancy: “For them to approve the Hummer deal would be a big contradiction.”

A ministry of commerce spokesman said Tengzhong failed to provide a sound purchase plan. He reiterated China’s policy of encouraging development of a renewable, green and environmentally friendly economy.

The ministry has previously insisted it never received an application by Sichuan Tengzhong – but the company repeatedly denied it.

Yale Zhang, of CSM Automotive in Shanghai, said the deal violated not only Beijing’s environmental goals but also Chinese insistence on consolidation in the auto industry, which has about 50-100 carmakers.

“This was just the wrong group making the wrong purchase in the wrong way,” said an industry insider, noting Tengzhong did not obtain provisional clearance before announcing the deal.

Beijing is thought willing to sanction the much bigger $1bn acquisition of Volvo by Geely, the big private Chinese automaker. That deal is expected to be finalised by March’s end.

Last year BAIC, the Beijing automaker, acquired some assets of Saab from GM, with central government approval.

—————

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Goodbye, Hummer
Published: February 25, 2010

The world might be saved: It looks as if the Hummer is destined for the junkyard. The plan by General Motors to sell the muscular brand to a Chinese company went up in a puff of exhaust smoke on Wednesday after government officials in China said that they had never received the necessary application for approval and thus couldn’t grant it.

We suspect the deal collapsed because the Chinese Communist Party — which rarely shows much shame — is worried about China’s image as the most polluting nation on the planet. If true, that is good news.

There may be other good news. While some policy analysts have called — sensibly, in our opinion — for steeper gasoline taxes to encourage American drivers to embrace fuel efficiency, some economists have been skeptical. They acknowledge that drivers might decide to drive less and take public transportation more. But they warn that most could not afford to quickly dump their gas guzzlers for more fuel-efficient cars.

Yet given time, it seems, people change their ways. Americans drove 3.4 percent fewer miles in 2008 — when gas prices shot up to a peak of $4 a gallon nationally — than in 2007. And many who had bought the Hummer when a gallon of gas cost $2 decided that they couldn’t afford to tool around town in a small tank that would run, on average, around 10 miles on a gallon.

By last year, even as gas prices drifted downward, only about 9,000 Hummers were sold in the United States. That was a steep drop from 71,000 in 2006. In the spring of 2008, G.M. announced that it could not keep the sinking brand. The company is weighing two long-shot bids, but it is more than likely to wind down the brand.

Gasoline is back around $2.50 a gallon, and Americans are falling back on some of their old bad habits. Still, the Hummer’s tale is a vivid example of the power of gas prices to change Americans’ ways. It also suggests that, given the proper incentives and disincentives, all the world’s nations can embrace a greener future.

 http://www.coha.org/the-yanomami-malaria…

The Yanomami: Malaria, Genocide and Policy Prospects.
by By Council On Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) Research Fellow Jared Ritvo

• A Black Mark for Brazil
• The situation couldn’t be more urgent
The Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon have been decimated in the last 20 years by an incursion of prospect-miners (garimpeiros) who brought diseases (especially malaria) and other maladies to their hitherto relatively isolated communities.  Here we follow the history of the garimpeiros incursion  examining the current  trying situation and make urgent policy suggestions.
Background on the Yanomami Way of Life:
The Yanomami live in an area of approximately 192,000 km² spanning both sides of the Brazil-Venezuela border.  Their land varies in ecological biomes from lowland tropical rainforest in both the Orinoco and Amazon River drainages to mountainous highlands.  The Yanomami numbered approximately 29,000 in 2005 with about 14,000 living within Brazil. They are dispersed throughout this region and live at low population densities.
This research essay primarily concerns the Yanomami who live on the Brazilian side of the border who are being seen as the most affected by both garimpagem (prospecting) intruding on their native lands and malaria epidemics.
Likewise, this situation, is even being termed as a genocide due to the inexcusable behavior of a number of Brazilian government officials who both lent support to the garimpeiros and knowingly adjusted to the spread of disease in order to wreak havoc on the Yanomami people (particularly due to the exposure of the tribe to malaria, against which they did not have immunity).  During the height of the gold rush from 1987 to 1999, it is estimated that the malaria epidemic, combined with the armed battles against garimpeiros, shockingly led to the loss of thirteen percent of the Yanomami population living in the region.
This modern gold rush on Yanomami lands began in the mid-1970s when the Brazilian military dictatorship assessed and identified the value of mineral deposits (including gold) on Yanomami lands under the mapping project Radambrasil.  At the same time, between 1970 and 1980 the international price of gold increased seventeen-fold.  In 1980, an estimated 5,000 garimpeiros moved onto the Yanomami lands at Furo de Santa Rosa.  Garimpeiros generally were destitute men, as a result of protracted urban unemployment, or were landless rural workers. At Furo de Santa Rosa, garimpeiros quickly outnumbered the local Yanomami population of the Shiriana subgroup, twenty-five to one.  According to University of Brasília Anthropologist, Dr. Alcida Ramos, less than six months after the arrival of garimpeiros, the Shiriana began contracting malaria.  There were some deaths and anemia became widespread.
Garimpeiros used the town of Furo de Santa Rosa as the starting point from which they journeyed out onto the tributaries of the Uraricoera River, approaching a National Foundation for the Indian (FUNAI) outpost located at Ericó  Notably, the garimpagem sites were, and are still, almost always accessed by small aircraft using remote jungle airstrips. Without airstrips, garimpagem would not have been feasible due to the lack of other transportation means in the forested Yanomami lands.
In 1986 the Polícia Federal drove most of the garimpeiros out of the region.  Simultaneously, the military began a secret operation in the Northern Brazil’s Northern Amazon called Calha Norte. This intiative has been described by scholars as a covert plan of the military to move settlers into the region to thwart a feared foreign influence.  Under the plan, the Air Force would widen a landing strip at a site called Paapiú without declaring the purpose.  They then would evict the local Yanomami and declare Paapiú a national security area.   However, after this was done, the Air Force did nothing further at the site. The ploy should be understood as a pro-garimpagem (or at least pro-settlement) act due to the absence of any other explanation as to why the Air Force would have built this airstrip in the first place.  This interpretation of the purpose of this act is in accordance with previous findings that Calha Norte was a clandestine operation to settle the region.
This Air Force-improved landing strip at Paapiú soon proved a catalyst for a gold rush.  By August 1987, thousands of garimpeiros had arrived at the airstrip.   From that location, according to Dr. Ramos, they were able to access most of the Yanomami territory.
While the military and FUNAI permitted garimpeiro’s entrance to Yanomami territory, they simultaneously forced the eviction of all medical personnel, anthropologists, other researchers, missionaries and NGO workers.  Dr. Ramos states that for the two years following the expulsion of humanitarians aid-worker contingentsm.the Yanomami became infected with malaria at far higher rates than normal and were increasingly subject to other perils as a result of the incursion of garimpeiros, yet received no assistance.
In December 1987, shortly after the eviction, the President of FUNAI and the Governor of the State of Roraima proclaimed that the “reserves of gold mining” on Yanomami lands could now be legally extracted.
By December 1987, garimpeiros numbered more than 5,000 near Paapiú.  An atmosphere of “gold fever” spread in the Northern Brazilian Amazon, particularly in the capital of Roraima, Boa Vista.  A large portion of Boa Vista residents, including most small farmers and many professionals, left their jobs to head for the placers on Yanomami lands.  By January 1988, garimpeiros numbered approximately 10,000.  By 1989, they numbered 20,000 to 40,000.
The cumulative effect of this incursion is the estimation that from 1987 to early 1999—the height of the gold rush—thirteen percent of the Yanomami residents in the region died due to environmental impact and malaria.  During these years, the pernicious gold rush overwhelmed the Yanomami in the state of Roraima with garimpeiros eventually outnumbering the indigenous population nearly six-fold.
FUNASA’s Model for Delivering Health Care to the Indigenous: Successes and Failures
In order to understand the current successes and failures of the administration of health care to the Yanomami, an examination of the National Health Foundation’s (FUNASA’s) health care delivery model is necessary.  FUNASA first implemented its present model for administering health care to the indigenous people in 1999 with the Lei Arouca.
This model is designed around the Sanitary Indigenous District (DSEI), the organizational structure for the administration of health services. The Yanomami have their own designated Sanitary Indigenous District, which includes Yanomami lands in both the states of Roraima and Amazonas.  The Lei Arouca states that local leaders, anthropologists, indigenous groups, government entities, NGOs and others were consulted in the formation of these districts.
The DSEI is organized around an Indian Health Office in a regional urban center adjacent to the indigenous area.  The Indian Health Office maintains common hospital resources.  The Pole Base is the head office inside the indigenous area and has basic health equipment.  Finally, there are many health posts, which branch out all around the DSEI.  Health posts have very limited infrastructure and are designed to attend to common diseases such as malaria and diarrhea.
The human resources structure for personnel who deliver healthcare in the field in Lei Arouca contains both the Multidisciplinary Teams for Indigenous Health (EMSIs) and the Indigenous Health Agent (AIS).  Relevant to malaria care, the EMSIs consist of doctors, nurses, nurse technicians and lab professionals who work primarily in the Pole Bases. The AISs, accordingly, do the majority of their work in native villages.  FUNASA states that in the past ten years it has done extensive work in training indigenous health agents, and that it has selected them based on specific criteria, including community recommendations.
From the 2009 publication presenting Lei Arouca’s structure, DSEIs appear self-sufficient, or in other words, one would assume that they have contracts with all the personnel who are directly employees of FUNASA.  However, this has not been the case in the Yanomami DSEI.  FUNASA sub-contracted other organizations to deliver health care in the Yanomami DSEI.  These organizations have had varied success with treating malaria epidemics.
The NGO Urihi, sub-contracted from 2000 to 2004, states that it had great success in mitigating malaria among the Yanomami population of Brazil.  Accordingly, malaria cases in the Yanomami DSEI fell almost ninety-nine percent.  However, in 2004 Urihi opted to end its contract due to increased restrictions by FUNASA. This change stipulated in 2004 that contracted organizations (such as Urihi) would simply be personnel providers and all staff would effectively work under FUNASA’s guidelines.  Prior to these restrictions Urihi was more autonomous.   A professional researcher on the Yanomami, Francois Michel Le-Tourneau, confirmed that Urihi was effective in providing excellent care with great monitoring and treatment of anyone in various locations who presented a case of malaria.
Following the termination of the relationship between FUNASA and Urihi, FUNASA subcontracted The University of Brasília Foundation (FUB).  Unfortunately for the Yanomami people, the FUB was not nearly as effective at administering health care despite increased funding.  Corruption rumors circulated in the press regarding FUB’s healthcare management and consequently the public ministry forced FUNASA to abandon the FUB contract.
Consideration of Genocide:
An essential question surrounding the Gold Rush on Yanomami lands, and its related problems, such as the malaria epidemic and environmental degradation is: what, if any, policy or action on the part of individuals or groups can be interpreted as genocide?  If indeed there are potential criminal cases, the parties involved should be indentified and investigated.  Additionally, if consideration of genocide were to resurface with indictments and international news media attention, it would have a profound effect on a future Brazilian government policy for the Terra Indigena Yanomami.  Under these conditions one could expect a new political presence in Brasília to end the current negligence of its politically damaging inadequate delivery of health care to the Yanomami; moreover, better resources for health care would reach the Yanomami and probably, if the new development has the political play to do it, one could witness the eviction of currently resident garimpeiros.
In her book on the Yanomami, Dr. Linda Rabben generally characterizes the two-year period during which would-be aid givers were expelled from Yanomami lands, starting in 1987 by a FUNAI request to the Federal Police to do so.  It was an incredibly suspicious action to expel groups, which were not directly involved in garimpagem activities from the Yanomami lands, and the following will argue that some individuals should be investigated for having committed genocide.
In 1988, after FUNAI made the initial motion to evict would-be aid givers, FUNAI President Romero Jucá made public statements denying that the Yanomami were dying en masse from malaria epidemics.  Only a few months after these statements, Brazilian President José Sarney appointed Jucá governor of the state of Roraima, a newly created political division.  President Sarney by then already had been petitioned by six Brazilian senators to stop what media and NGOs were already calling “the genocide of the Yanomami.”
At that time, genocide protestors already sought demarcation of Yanomami lands to develop a legal basis to expel garimpeiros.  Counter to the Yanomami’s interests, however, FUNAI proposed a delineation of 19 “islands” which they could populate, reversing their former proposal for a 9.4 million hectare continuous Yanomami reserve. Dr. Rabben believes it appears FUNAI acted against the Yanomami’s interests and, deliberately supported garimpeiros by, in effect, banning foreign and domestic aid providers from having a physical presence on Yanomami land.
This gerrymandering-like attempt to restructure the Yanomami’s land reserves to accommodate garimpeiros was put into action when President Sarney ratified the “19-island” scheme. Sarney then further bolstered garimpeiros’ ambitions with decrees that created two national forests within Yanomami lands and prohibited entrance of any “third party” without prior authorization from the Brazilian National Government’s Institute for the Environment and Natural Resources (IBAMA) or FUNAI.
Considering genocide, many environmentalists fervently believe that Sarney should be indicted. He acted counter to the sheer preservation of the Yanomami.  Dr. Rabben notes that Sarney, under international and national pressure to do so, initially signed a decree to expel garimpeiros from the Yanomami lands, but then signed another decree effectively reversing the first.  This second decree was the creation of two reserves for garimpeiros within the Yanomami indigenous lands.  These reserves were publicly defended by Sarney’s Minister of Justice with the dubious assertion that they were meant to prevent the spread of epidemics to other parts of the country.  The federal attorney general responded by drafting impeachment charges against the president for attempting to foil plans to expel garimpeiros.  Sarney left office in 1990 with impeachment accusations still pending.
The international legal definition of genocide provides a compelling legal basis for indicting FUNAI employees (including Jucá), President Sarney, members of the Federal Police or others.  According to Articles II and III of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, genocide must contain both “mental” and “physical elements”.  The mental element is “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial or religious group.”  The physical element contains five distinctive acts, three of which are relevant to this case: “(a) killing members of the group, (b) causing bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (c) deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”   Acts punishable and relevant to the case are: “(a) genocide, (b) conspiracy to commit genocide, (c) attempt to commit genocide and (e) complicity in genocide.”
Regarding the mental element, a general anti-indigenous culture can be found in the history of this case among FUNAI officials, President Sarney and, of course, among miners and mining interests in Boa Vista, Roraima.  Indeed, it may not be difficult to prove that in many specific instances there was intent to destroy this ethnic group.  Because President Sarney and others knowingly and repeatedly made decisions that they knew would expose the Yanomami to malaria epidemics and thus a potentially life-threatening illness, a thorough legal investigation of the aforementioned parties would appear to be necessary.
Regarding the physical element, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide definition“(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” This is most applicable to the decision by FUNAI to expel all would-be aid givers from the Yanomami lands.  President Romero Jucá’s actions as the head of FUNAI should be investigated for genocide based on the application of these terms, as should those of other FUNAI employees’ actions, due to overwhelming evidence that suggests the organization was deliberately placing the Yanomami under such prejudicial conditions.  Their delinquencies are, of course, even more egregious because FUNAI’s raison d’être is supposedly to protect the indigenous.
Policy Suggestions:
The problems identified in reviewing the historical record of this case include: (1) instances of anti-indigenous sentiment in government bodies dealing with the Yanomami, (2) negligence of the Yanomami’s interests and needs, and (3) and the high probability of corruption.  These bureaucratic failures occurred in state and the national government, in FUNAI, FUNASA and in the organizations FUNASA contracted ostensibly to offer the delivery of health care in the field.
Simultaneously, according to interviews with anthropologists who work in the region, as well as reports filed from Urihi, since 2004 malaria has been increasing among the Yanomami.  To stop this recurring outbreak and avoid repeating past mistakes, the government and all parties involved must pursue policies in which the delivery of health care truly focuses on the best interests of the Yanomami and does not misappropriate or fail to provide funds and resources intended for them (as the Yanomami cite in their Manifesto Sobre a Saúde Indígena).   Moreover, it is essential the Yanomami be involved as much as possible in the process of administering their own health care system.  Realistically, the best way to accomplish this is to have Yanomami advocacy organizations, such as Hutukara (the Yanomami-formed organization to advocate their needs) and the District Health Councils, to meet regularly with DSEI administrators.  These organizations should establish a routine procedure for registering formal complaints and suggestions about improving the administration of Yanomami health care.
Suggestions on Improving the Quality of and Access to Health Care to Address Malaria:
Following the grievances and requests made by the Yanomami people, the Brazilian federal government recently created a new body to specifically oversee indigenous health care  under the aegis of the Ministry of Health.  Based on the document Boletim 92 by Commissão Pro-Yanomami, the new government body will structure their health care hierarchy much like FUNASA under Lei Arouca.
Groups such as the Commissão Pro-Yanomami, which was the original NGO formed to address Yanomami needs, and now Hutukara, are examples of organizations on-site in Boa Vista which should have input in any new policy.  Many recommendations for oversight are put forth in their Manifesto Sobre a Saúde Indígena. An overview of the recommendations follows:
(1)    District Health Councils approve of decisions regarding the hiring of candidates for head of the Sanitary Indigenous District.
(2)    District Health Councils approve of any organizations contracted to provide the Yanomami health care in the field.  (Past examples of contracted organizations include: Urihi and FUB.)
(3)    Indigenous Health Agents should have demonstrated their capacity and have at least a high school education with a preference given to persons trained in indigenous human resources, in an effort to decrease negligence and corruption
Recently, under the restructuring that created a new indigenous health sub-section under the ministry of health, a career track was created with a specific training course for persons to be educated in indigenous health.  Indeed this is a positive development because persons delivering health care to the indigenous should be trained in doing so, and should be concerned about their unique needs. This is incorporated in the design of the new indigenous health organization that will replace Lei Arouca.
Another goal for the new policy concerning the Yanomami is that FUNAI and the Polícia Federal should block the illegal entrance of garimpeiros onto the Terra Indigena Yanomami and evict those mining there illegally.  This should be done because garimpeiros environmentally degrade Yanomami land as well as increase the spread of malaria to the Yanomami.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that we will see an increase in this type of enforcement in the future.  This is because the Terra Indigena Yanomami is vast, the agencies responsible for this enforcement (the Polícia Federal and FUNAI) are too understaffed and underfunded, and there is at present little political capital in Brasília to effectively pursue this policy goal.   The only way the Brazilian government would finally evict the garimpeiros and make a wholehearted attempt to keep them out is if investigations are begun and lead to individuals being indicted for committing genocide during the period 1987 to 1990.  This legal attention to the issue would create a desire on the part of the Brazilian government, and from the Brazilian populace in general, to demonstrate to the international community that the perilous situation of the Yanomami is being handled carefully and with responsibility.  Likewise this would inevitably lead to the Yanomami receiving better health care.
In general, although evicting garimpeiros is important, addressing health care is a better option for obstructing the spread of malaria.  There are a number of reasons for this, the foremost one being it is the most feasible solution for malaria epidemics as the disease has already been sufficiently introduced by garimpeiros in the Yanomami lands. Evicting garimpeiros now would not be effective at preventing the spread of malaria epidemics (further research is required to make this determination with any authority).  Also, if the Brazilian government evicts garimpeiros they may simply return, and policing their reentrance into a massive piece of land is quite difficult.  One of the best ways to inhibit garimpeiros’ access to Yanomami lands could be restricting access to airstrips in the region, but this solution also falls prey to issues of patrolling a huge swath of land in light of understaffing on the part of the Brazilian government.   One thing is for certain: past history shows that nothing will happen automatically, and enormous willpower on the government’s part is required if the problem is to seriously be addressed.

February 25, 2010,  from ALDE
Ukraine must make up for lost time.

The European Parliament today adopted its opinion on Ukraine following recent Presidential elections.

ALDE Vice President, Adina Valean (PNL, Romania), was a member of the EU’s election monitoring mission. In adopting the resolution Valean highlighted the five years of lost time in addressing the constitutional deficits in Ukraine that have held back genuine reforms and undermined Ukraine’s reputation as a stable democracy:

“Ukraine has a great deal of potential but it has sacrificed a lot of good will in recent years by its failure to resolve the internal checks and balances in its own system of governance.”

“Unfortunately for the moment there exists a lack of clarity on both sides regarding the nature of the EU’s present and future relationship with Ukraine which is hindering better cooperation and understanding. Following the change in Government, this is the first honest debate we need to have with the new leadership in Kiev, and to see what common ground and common projects we can find that are in the interest of both parties.”

—————–

It is quite clear that the Ukraine is torn by its internal division of a west that looks forward to the EU and an east that looks backwards to Russia. We said it before – nothing wrong with a split and allowing each part to attach itself to whomever they chose. But neigh – the Ukraine has had a government that was led by the east faction, and then by one that was led by the west faction that ended up splitting in two, now we have a return to power of the east faction that has learned something by being in opposition and now approaches the West before turning to Russia. We wish them luck but think that in face of the rising economies of Asia, it is for Russia itself to start changing and push for its own incorporation with Europe. Obviously, this will mean that Russia give up its nuclear high rolling, starts aligning with the EU on issues like Iran, allow for more rights to its own people. What Russia’s efforts will do will then cause further stalling in the creation of the European Federation, but at least give a good reason for the stalling of these advances within the EU that occur anyway. The Ukraine’s future is indeed the link to the entree of Russia to its own negotiations with the EU.