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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 3rd, 2008 G-8 climate scorecard shows US in last. The U.S. has done the least among the world’s eight largest economies to address global warming, a study released Thursday found.
Joachim Faber, an Allianz board member who helped compile the scorecards, said a global emissions trading market is important to fighting climate change, and that the EU should lead its development.
Bush Makes Final Push for Global Climate Deal. “In his final months in office, President Bush is mounting a last-ditch effort to forge a new global deal to limit greenhouse-gas emissions but finds himself once again at odds with much of the rest of the world on how to address climate change. Bush aides said a deal might be struck when the president sits down next week in Japan with the leaders of the world’s largest industrialized nations and developing countries such as China and India. Japan is pushing for leaders at the Group of Eight summit to agree to a goal of cutting global carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2050, a proposal that the White House appears to be considering seriously. The Bush administration is also conducting negotiations with countries on including more-specific targets for each to meet by 2020 or 2025. Germany is pushing for more-significant cuts in emissions than the United States and some other countries are willing to consider, while China and India want the United States and other industrialized countries to do most of the heavy lifting for the next 10 to 15 years. Previewing his G-8 agenda yesterday in the Rose Garden, Bush emphasized the necessity of including the developing countries in any agreement struck by his administration… Environmentalists contend that Bush’s moves on global warming are too little, too late. They say even an agreement on a long-term goal would be meaningless because it would likely not bind the United States to making actual reductions. In many ways, they said, G-8 nations have begun to shift their focus to presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, both of whom have indicated a willingness to consider steeper reductions than Bush — the kind of cuts the White House regards as unrealistic… Anything that the leaders agree to next week would have to be worked into a treaty that the United Nations hopes to conclude by the end of 2009 in Copenhagen.” ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 24th, 2008 From: dissemination at wider.unu.edu The Helsinky-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER). FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS Southern Engines of Global Growth: Africa and CIBS (China, India, Brazil and South Africa) ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 8th, 2008 The Financial Times of London: A weaker dollar could even see investors push the oil price higher. Last month, Opec president Chakib Khelil used this argument to predict $200 oil – and it looked less far-fetched this week when the Goldman Sachs analyst who correctly predicted $100 oil made a similar, if self-serving, prediction. Look what I came up when we searched for “Oil $200″ on Financial Times online: http://search.ft.com/search?queryText=Oi… The stuff is exciting to us - this because we need a higher price of oil in order to bring recalcitrant folks to their senses. The need is to proceed decreasing the dependence on oil. To do this we will have to sell the remaining Hummers to the world’s museums. We saw this week the start by General Motors scratching their production of SUVs. Also, we saw the UN making grand promises for a hunger free world, but going home after being rebuffed by the Latin Americans who won the day. Biofuels are not the source of hunger but the opposition to them is another oil industry invention. The higher the price of oil - the better - but clearly we can envision much better ways of achieving this then by burying the dollar so that the oil magnates get their feed. Had we gone to the sun rather then Iraq, we would by now have turned the dollar around. Washington will try now to tar white-man Barak Obama in order to keep some of the Washington establishment in place. Those folks better be retired to the salt mines and straight thinking fresh and green folks replace every single one of them. Do not bring in MIT professors, they did not relearn yet the difference between thermodynamics and human dynamics. Bring in old time, home grown conservationists as the real honesty-goodness conservatives. We looked at some of the stuff being pushed around the webs and we are appalled at what the US election campaign will be like. Bring in folks that believe a dollar in hand is valued more then a dollar in speculative spin. Bring in 140 IQ folks that know to operate technologies that could effectively be run by 100 IQ folks. Do not sell us pie-in-the-sky, but allow the world to grow rice and wheat and corn. Make the world proud again when holding in hand a green US dollar. Obama, we hope someone gives you to look at this posting. ### |
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G8 SUMMIT 2008 - Environment Heads to Talk CO2 in Kobe - Three Days Starting Saturday, May 24, 2008. Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 20th, 2008
G8 SUMMIT 2008 - Environment Heads to Talk CO2 cuts in Kobe.
The ministers will seek G8 cooperation on promoting the “co-benefits approach” to help developing countries achieve economic growth while curbing pollution and waste, Environment Ministry officials said. The ministers will also discuss steps to protect biodiversity and to ensure the efficient use of resources with the “3Rs” approach of reducing waste by promoting reuse and recycling, the officials said. Emerging economies, including Brazil, China and India, plan to take part in the Kobe session. ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 19th, 2008 Achim Steiner, Executive Director of UNEP, invites you to participate in the following side-event:
Background: Agenda: This side event will provide an introduction to the UNEP Programme in the Congo, including the following: UNEP will report on our programme to assist the Congolese govt, including the post-conflict assessment, assistance with the environmental framework law, and facilitation of a stakeholder dialogue in the Virungas region. For further details, contact: melanie.virtue at unep.org ————————- ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 8th, 2008 US Consumers Rank Last in World Survey of Green Habits. Washington - Americans rank last in a new National Geographic-sponsored survey released Wednesday that compares environmental consumption habits in 14 countries. Americans were least likely to choose the greener option in three out of four categories - housing, transportation and consumer goods - according to the assessment. In the fourth category, food, Americans ranked ahead of Japanese consumers, who eat more meat and seafood.
“This is not just a one-time snapshot,” Garcia said. “Some of the most important information may yet be revealed.” India and Brazil tied for the highest score - 60 points out of a hundred. U.S. consumers scored 44.9. In between, China scored 56.1, Mexico 54.2, Hungary 53.2, Russia 52.4, Great Britain 50.2, Germany 50.2, Australia 50.2, Spain 50, Japan 49.1, France 48.7 and Canada 48.5. Results are based on 1,000 online respondents per country interviewed in January and February by GlobeScan, an international polling firm based in Toronto. To see how you score, take an abbreviated version of the survey. It’s at nationalgeographic.com A separate GlobeScan survey showed consumers in Brazil, Mexico and China to be most concerned about global warming. In general, people in developing countries were more worried about harming the environment than those in developed ones were. They also live in smaller houses, are more likely to consume locally produced food and more likely to get to work by foot, bike or public transportation. The consumer choice rankings were adjusted for factors in which individuals have no control, such as climate and the availability of mass transit. ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 6th, 2008 From: media at kdun.org Committee for a Democratic United Nations. Tuesday 6 May 2008 The leader of the Green Party of Canada, Elizabeth May, commented in Sao Paulo that The Committee for a Democratic U.N., an NGO specialized on the topic based in Berlin, CONTACTS: Senator Isabelle Durant, Secretary-General, Ecolo, Didier Couernelle, Ecolo delegate at the congress, Elizabeth May, Party leader, Canadian Greens, Andreas Bummel, Executive Chairman, Committee for a Democratic U.N., MORE INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET: 2nd Global Greens Congress: http://www.globalgreens.org.br/ ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 15th, 2008 nbsp;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con… Economists Debate Link Between War, Credit Crisis
For House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the connection between the Iraq conflict and the U.S. economic downturn is simple: “The president has taken us into a failed war,” the California Democrat said recently. “He’s taken us deeply into debt, and that debt is taking us into recession.” This assessment was put to powerful political effect in the latest congressional hearings on the war, when Democrats and Republicans alike told Army Gen. David H. Petraeus that the oil-rich Iraqi government should relieve the United States of the conflict’s financial burdens. And Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) echoed the theme yesterday at a manufacturing forum in Pittsburgh. “If we can spend $10 billion a month rebuilding Iraq,” the Democratic presidential contender declared, “we can spend $15 billion a year in our own country to put Americans back to work and strengthen the long-term competitiveness of our economy.” But this logic may have more political salience than economic validity, according to many economists, who say that the assertions linking the five-year-old conflict in Iraq to the domestic economic slide have been oversimplified. “You should support the war or oppose the war, which I do and have done from the start, on the merits of the war itself,” said Martin N. Baily, a former chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. But, he added, “the current problems the United States is facing have very little to do with the war in Iraq.” Even so, the theme resonated in Congress last week. “We’re kind of bankrupting this country,” Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) told Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. “We’re eating our seed corn. We’re in a recession, and God only knows how long we’re going to be in it.” The link between Iraq and the downturn reflects a growing public perception that individual economic anxieties must stem somehow from the unpopular war — a unified theory of political misery, said Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster. “It’s a sour economy, it’s a sour mood and it’s a sour situation in Iraq,” he said. “The public has for the last two years been told about the cost of Iraq in terms of human life. But then there was a direct and important switch, when we went into what I call the surge period, where the budget costs became front and center. While the administration was touting military successes, what the American public saw directly were the costs.” Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who wrote the new book “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” contends that the connection is real. Even with a growing energy demand from China, the United States and elsewhere, oil traders anticipated before the war that the price of oil would remain about $25 a barrel. Instead, it has soared to more than $100 a barrel. Iraqi oil production has not risen with demand, in part because investment in the Middle East has been stunted by war-related unrest. Those price increases are self-perpetuating, Stiglitz argues. Oil-rich Persian Gulf states are so awash in money that they are not sure what to do with it all. By holding back oil production, they make more off what they do produce and keep their greatest asset — oil — in the ground as they search for ways to spend their cash. That cash, through state-owned sovereign wealth funds, has flowed into stocks, bonds and other investments, creating incentives for lenders to offer low-interest loans, many of which have now gone sour. But that is only one factor, by Stiglitz’s accounting. The federal government has sunk deeply into debt, first with tax cuts, then with accelerating war expenditures that have easily topped half a trillion dollars. That limited the government’s ability to keep the economy on track through tax cuts or domestic investments, so the Federal Reserve Board used low interest rates and the free flow of money to keep the economy growing. Cheap credit sparked rash loans, a housing bubble and the current crisis. “The war played a very important role,” Stiglitz said. To economists on the left and the right, his analysis strains credulity. Traditional economics hold that large budget deficits “crowd out” private lending, raising interest rates and making lending scarce, not profligate. “The credit crisis we got into is because of the housing boom, the relaxation of lending standards and certainly a lack of adequate supervision,” Baily said. “I don’t see a connection with government borrowing.” And most economists still think that oil prices are soaring because of rising demand, not constrained supply. “I guess you can argue there’s been a contagion of foolishness” sparked by a spendthrift federal government, “but that seems like a stretch,” said Kevin A. Hassett, an American Enterprise Institute economist and an adviser to Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Republicans have tried their best to beat back the argument before it takes hold, even citing one of their ideological nemeses, Princeton University economist and liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has raised doubts about any link between the war and the credit crunch. “While both parties agree that middle-class families and small businesses are struggling with skyrocketing costs of living, this latest argument from Democratic leaders smacks of political opportunism at its very worst,” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said last week. The analysis is politically powerful because people believe it. A CNN poll last month found that 71 percent of Americans say government spending in Iraq is a factor in the economic downturn. “When you’re spending over $50 to fill up your car because the price of oil is four times what it was before Iraq, you’re paying a price for this war,” Obama told an audience last month at the University of Charleston in West Virginia. “When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you’re paying a price for this war.” The analysis will drive the debate on the $108 billion in additional war spending that President Bush is now requesting. Congress is set to begin debate on war funding before the end of the month. “I think there is a connection between the state of our economy and Iraq, and what we’re spending over there,” said Rep. Baron P. Hill (Ind.), a leading Democratic budget hawk. “We’re limited as to what we can do to stimulate the economy. We’re limited as to what we can do on health care or any other program. We need to spend more money on infrastructure, on roads and bridges that would have a stimulative effect on the economy, and we’re not doing those things because of all the money we’re spending in Iraq.” |

























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