|
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on September 3rd, 2008 ==================== http://www.koreasociety.org/contemporary… South Korean Business and the DMZ in an Era of Climate Change South Korean businesses might use the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea as a resource in the country’s effort to fight global warming.
with Hall Healy, President, DMZ Forum Wednesday, September 10, 2008 The Korea Society $20 for members, $25 for nonmembers South Korea mastered the game of development economics, rising to become the world’s eleventh largest economy by producing cars, ships and electronics. Now, with climate change a major global issue, the game has changed. From desertification in Mongolia to increased flooding in North Korea, to car emissions, development and air pollution within its borders, South Korea is already wrestling with the effects of global warming on its economy. Can it successfully integrate with the new environmental paradigm? Hall Healy, president of The DMZ Forum, Inc., believes South Korea can thrive in this new era of green economics, and that the DMZ, untouched by 50 years of development, may be one of its biggest assets. If developed responsibly, the pristine environment of the DMZ could provide clean drinking water to millions of Koreans, trillions of won in income and an untold number of jobs in eco-tourism, sustainable agriculture and ecosystem services. Healy will also discuss other strategies that could help South Korean industries re-tool for the future with landscape ecologist John Mickelson and William B. Shore, secretary of The DMZ Forum. Christine Kim, Yale’s program director for the Environmental Performance Index will discuss North and South Korea’s rankings. This forum is jointly presented by The Korea Society and the DMZ Forum www.dmzforum.org) Permalink | ### |
Printer Friendly
|
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 27th, 2008 TRADE WITH RUSSIA HAS BROUGHT PROSPERITY TO THE FORMERLY SLEEPING SHIMANE PREFECTURE OF JAPAN.
Permalink | ### |
|
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 26th, 2008 Climate conference makes progress on key dispute. By (AP) Published: 2008-08-23, ACCRA, Ghana.
Under the Kyoto pact, only 37 industrial countries committed to meet specific targets. Together, they were required to cut emissions by an average 5 percent from 1990 levels by 2012. The United States refused to participate in the Kyoto regime because it excluded China and other large newly powerful economies from any obligation. Korea, which is not one of the 37, surprised delegates by announcing that next year it will adopt a target for reducing its carbon emissions by 2020, but declined to give specifics. Earlier this year, South Africa also said it would embrace self-imposed targets, peaking its emissions by 2025.
*** But financing remains unresolved and it was unclear how governments would move forward, she said. Japan, which advanced the proposal earlier this year to a chorus of criticism, said it was pleased with the response in Accra after it dropped several components that aroused objections. Developing countries had feared the Japanese proposal was a backdoor device to impose binding targets that would limit their economic development. “That is a great advancement compared with the beginning of this year,” Japanese delegate Jun Arima told the conference. —————— From: sniffenj at un.org UNEP NEWS RELEASE Meanwhile, New Assessment of Clean Development Mechanism Shows ACCRA/NAIROBI, 26 August 2008 —
*** The report acknowledges that some subsidies or mechanisms, whether in the A case in point are feed-in tariffs that have kick-started a renewable The report also accepts that there may be cases where some subsidies can, The report also cites the case of Chile where well-devised subsidies have *** The new UNEP report– Reforming Energy Subsidies: Opportunities to Here Governments have gathered to continue negotiations under the Bali Road *** CDM Takes Off in Sub-Saharan Africa: The CDM, part of the Convention’s Kyoto Protocol agreed in 1997, allows These can range from wind and biomass energy projects to ones that tap There has been concern that the benefits of the CDM, a contrasting example The main countries benefiting to date have been the rapidly developing The new figures, compiled by the UNEP Risoe Centre on Energy, Climate and These include an oil well, gas flare reduction project in the DRC and a In Kenya new projects include a 35MW extension of geothermal, hot rocks, Mr. Steiner added: “Whereas fossil fuel subsidies are an example of a Here UNEP, along with partners including the UN Development Programme Other measures have included awareness-raising among banks and industry The UNEP Risoe Centre has been monitoring global trends in CDM investment “Excluding South Africa, there were only six CDM projects in five This still remains low compared to a global tally of close to 3,500 CDM “As new policy drivers and planned capacity development activities bear These could cumulatively generate over 65 million certified emission “Compared to CDM prodigies like India, Africa is poised to be the late —————————- Notes to Editors:
It says that Russia has the largest subsidies in dollar terms amounting to Iran comes second with around $37 billion; six countries, spending in The report can be downloaded at www.unep.org For more information, please contact: Nick Nuttall, Spokesperson/Head of ========= Permalink | ### |
|
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 18th, 2008 This weekend, as expected, the TV was plastered with the Russians in Georgia and the Beijing Olympics. President Bush and Secretary Condaleezza Rice said that Russia will not get away with this like it happened in Hungary. On CNN, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the man with the Kosovo and Bosnia experience, said this was not Kosovo. The Russians were ready to stage this action already two years ago. It happened now because there was a Russian provocation and there has been indeed a real ethnic cleansing going on in Ossetia and in Abkhazia that caused many thousands of refugees pouring continuously into Georgia. The US says the number is 150,000 displaced people. Holbrooke looks back into history and thinks of Budapest of 19956, Prag of 1966, Afghanistan of 1968 - so this is the invasion of Georgia that was executed in similar methodology. Dmitry Simes, President of the Washington DC Nixon Center, and Rose Gottemoeller, Director of Carnegie, Moscow, agree to the above and say that the fact that this happened again at the time of the Olympics, just shows the Putin self confidence and that Putin does not worry that this will harm Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014. That area is in fact just across the border from were fighting was going on now. Governor Bill Richardson stressed that this is not time for high US talk, simply, “we have no leverage on Russia,” so we have to engage them and not isolate them. He knows the area, problems, has been there - all as part of his UN Ambassadorship. Georgia was incorporated into Russia in 1801 and stayed under Russian rule for 190 years. They re-emerged as an independent state only in 1991. The Ossentians always considered themselves different from the Georgians - and also not similar to the Russians. The same goes for Abkhazia and Azaria as per Rick Stengel, editor of Time Magazine, who was this Sunday’s coordinator of the GPS program that is usually brought out by Fareed Zakaria. So, can one ostracize Russia from world business? Will this bring about a renewal of the Cold War? He does not think that Russia has become a revisionist State and that it is fighting for a larger Russia. His idea is that the area is specially complicated - something like the Balkans, and that there were many reasons to what went on. ——— ***
Cold Friends, Wrapped in Mink and Medals. By BILL KELLER Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us. Related Chrystia Freeland’s Article: The New Age of Authoritarianism www.ft.com August 12, 2008) So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us. If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989. The Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. From the dazzling locksteps of that opening ceremony, to the kowtowing international V.I.P.’s, to the carefully policed absence of protest, this was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess. Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international norms of behavior went unredeemed. The New York Times’s Andrew Jacobs followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had filed the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee. The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was not the ease or audacity but the swagger of it. This was not just about a couple of obscure border enclaves, nor even, really, about Georgia. This was existential payback. It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning. It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe. Mr. Putin is, in this sense of grievance, a man of his people, as visitors to the New York Times Web site can see in the sampling of breast-beating commentary from Russian bloggers. It is safe to assume that Mr. Putin’s already stratospheric popularity at home has grown to Phelpsian proportions, not least among the long-suffering military. In China, 1989 was the year that a spark of liberal aspiration flickered on Tiananmen Square, and was decisively extinguished. That was another beginning, or at least a renewal: of Chinese resolve. In May of that year, in the midst of the Tiananmen euphoria, Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited Beijing, and two visions of a new communism stared each other in the face. The protesters on the Chinese pavilion held banners welcoming Mr. Gorbachev as a champion of the greater freedom they sought. Meanwhile, the visiting Russian delegation marveled at the abundance in Chinese stores, the bounty of a policy that chose economic liberalization without political dissent. The Chinese and Russians scorned each other’s neo-Communist models, but in some ways they have evolved toward one another. Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. (The Chinese “street” felt no more sympathy for restive Tibetans than the Russian blogosphere felt for Georgia.) And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way. President Bush was mocked from both sides for his seeming impotence. Neoconservatives were appalled by photos of President Bush sharing a laugh with Mr. Putin in Beijing while Russian armor gathered at the Georgian border. For a president who has made the export of democracy his signature doctrine, that looked to the stand-tough crowd like a “Pet Goat” moment. Others argued that this was a crisis Mr. Bush tacitly encouraged by talking up Georgia’s rambunctious president as a friend and NATO candidate. By midweek, possibly goaded by the wailing of neoconservatives and the aggressively anti-Putin rhetoric of Senator John McCain, Mr. Bush had abruptly amped up his opprobrium and dispatched an American airlift of humanitarian aid. And by the weekend there was a cold war chill in the air. But Mr. Bush’s predicament is not just his. The question of how to deal with these reinvigorated autocracies bedevils the Europeans and will surely rank high among the legacy issues that confound Mr. Bush’s successor. This time it is not — or not yet — the threat of nuclear apocalypse that limits the West’s options toward our emboldened Eastern rivals. The Chinese, in fact, are acting as if they have gotten past the saber-rattling stage of emerging-power status; they lavish diplomacy on Taiwan and Japan, and deploy the might of capital instead. The Russians may be in a more adolescent, table-pounding stage of development, but Mr. Putin, too, prefers to work the economic levers, bullying with petroleum. The United States, meanwhile, is mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, estranged from much of the world, and bled by serial economic crises. History, it seems, is back, and not so obviously on our side. Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, covered the last years of the Soviet Union for the newspaper. ***
The New Age of Authoritarianism. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, democracy was on the march and we declared the End of History. Nearly two decades later, a neo-imperialist Russia is at war with Georgia, Communist China is proudly hosting the Olympics, and we find that, instead, we have entered the Age of Authoritarianism. It is worth recalling how different we thought the future would be in the immediate, happy aftermath of the end of the cold war. Remember Francis Fukuyama’s ringing assertion: “The triumph of the west, of the western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism.” Even in the heady days of 1989, that declaration of universal - and possibly eternal - ideological victory seemed a little hubristic to Professor Fukuyama’s many critics. Yet his essay made such an impact because it captured the scale, and the enormous benefits, of the change sweeping through the world. Not only was the stifling Soviet - which was really the Russian - suzerainty over central and eastern Europe and central Asia coming to an end but, even more importantly, the very idea of a one-party state, ruthlessly presiding over a centrally planned economy, seemed to be discredited, if not forever, then surely for our lifetimes. That collapse brought freedom and prosperity to millions of people who had lived under Soviet rule. Moreover, the implosion of Soviet communism inspired hundreds of millions of others around the world to embrace freer markets and demand more responsive governments. The great global economic boom of the past 20 years, which has brought more people out of poverty more quickly than at any other time in human history, would not have been possible had the Soviet way of ordering the world not been discredited first. Yet today, in much of the world, the spread of freedom is being checked by an authoritarian revanche. That shift has been most obvious in the petro-states, where oil is casting its usual curse. From Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, the black-gold bonanza has given authoritarian regimes the currency to buy off or to repress their subjects. In Russia, oil has fuelled an economic boom that prime minister Vladimir Putin, and some of his foreign admirers, mistakenly attribute to his careful demolition of the chaotic democracy of the 1990s. For Russians, that argument is strengthened by the fact that the rising economic power of the moment - China - is unashamedly sticking to its faith in one-party rule. The end of the cold war made it tempting to believe that as countries opened up their markets, and became richer in the process, they would inevitably open up their societies, too. George W. Bush, US president, reiterated that hopeful thesis on his Asia tour last week, insisting: “Young people who grow up with the freedom to trade goods will ultimately demand the freedom to trade ideas.” But the Chinese mandarins and the Russian siloviki are taking a different view - and acting on it. As China scholar David Shambaugh recounts in his new book, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation , the CCP studied the collapse of Soviet communism with great care. And rather than seeing it as proof of the inevitable, global triumph of western liberalism, the Chinese comrades treated the Russian example as a textbook case of what a ruling Communist party ought not to do. In this version of history, sinologist Andrew Nathan tells me, 1989 is also a turning point, but not because that was when communism’s most notorious wall came down. Instead, the key event of that year was the bloody suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square: “As a propaganda position they have put it out that we had a crackdown in 1989 and we saved the party and we saved the country,” he says. “We didn’t have a failure of will like the Russians. Without that, we wouldn’t have been a great, modern power.” That’s a point of view Mr Putin has embraced, too, describing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy and his own reconstruction of a neo-authoritarian state as the only way to restore Russian “greatness”. The west has been remarkably sanguine about this resurgence of authoritarianism, and one reason is that, this time, the comrades have money. Even as the Kremlin repeatedly confiscates the assets not just of its own businesspeople but of foreign ones, too, investment bankers, and plain old investors, are flocking to a Moscow flush with petro-roubles. The same is true of the Gulf states. China, on a path to become the world’s largest economy, is the most attractive of all. But the Age of Authoritarianism is bad news for all of us, not just the human rights campaigners that businesspeople and practitioners of realpolitik love to dismiss. Like all overly rigid objects, authoritarian regimes conceal a tremendous fragility in their apparent strength - and their leaders know it. It is this realisation that has driven Mr Putin’s systematic destruction of all forms of civil society - an eminently pragmatic measure, although it has mystified some outside observers, who wonder why so popular a leader needs to be so heavy-handed. China’s chiefs have figured this out, too, hence their anxiety about everything from the Muslim Uighurs to the internet to the former Soviet Union’s “colour revolutions”. Of course, another way to ensure popular support for your authoritarian regime is by playing up nationalist sentiment. We are more tolerant of our home-grown bullies if we think we need them to fight our enemies abroad - as even democratic America has demonstrated in recent years. Mr Putin has understood this all along, launching a brutal attack on Chechnya even before his coronation as president in 2000. Russia’s expert taunting of the hotheads in Georgia, followed by immediate and massive retaliation the moment Tbilisi took the bait, is the latest evidence that, for the Kremlin, neo-imperialism is an essential bulwark of neo-authoritarianism. Bringing down the walls really did make the world safer. Now that so many leaders are building them back up again, figuring out how to contain the 21st century’s monied authoritarians is our most pressing foreign policy dilemma.
Permalink | ### |
|
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 16th, 2008 http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nn20… Saturday, Aug. 16, 2008 Cabinet trio visit Yasukuni. By KAZUAKI NAGATA, Staff writer, Japan Times online. Cabinet ministers and at least 53 Diet members visited Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on surrender day Friday while Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and two key ministers opted to keep their distance from the contentious landmark, which served as Japan’s spiritual pillar during the war.
The 63rd anniversary of Japan’s surrender, Former nationalistic Prime Ministers Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe also paid their respects Friday. Koizumi was notorious for making annual visits to the shrine while prime minister from 2001 to 2006, including on surrender day in his final year. Each visit provoked harsh outcries from China and South Korea. Joining them Friday were farm minister Seiichi Ota, Justice Minister Okiharu Yasuoka, consumer affairs minister Seiko Noda and nationalist Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, who went for a ninth year in a row. Noda, often regarded as having the best chance of becoming Japan’s first female prime minister, previously visited the shrine when she was posts minister. When asked if she felt awkward about coming to the shrine while Fukuda did not, Noda said his decision was based on his opinion and the Cabinet was not told to refrain. “People have different religious views, so (going to a shrine) should be freely allowed,” said Lower House member Yoshinobu Shimamura, who heads a nonpartisan group that visits the shrine together. Shimamura led 52 other Diet conservatives on the annual visit. Despite the scorching weather, the shrine attracted a myriad of visitors, many there to witness the lawmakers’ visit. The shrine served as the backbone for the Shinto fervor that drove Japan’s war. Dead soldiers were enshrined there as gods who protected the country, and many relatives of the war dead still go to Yasukuni to remember loved ones even 63 years after the end of the war. A 56-year-old man from Ishikawa Prefecture who requested anonymity said Yasukuni’s supporters and detractors both have their points, and it is difficult to say what’s right regarding the politicians’ visits. The prime minister and other ministers may need to be careful about expressing their views too much because “it is a fact that visiting Yasukuni has caused problems,” he said. On the other hand, while asserting an understanding of other countries’ viewpoints, he said they should not be so critical of a “domestic” issue. ————– Fukuda sticks to neutral venues: Prime minister honors nation’s war dead at nonreligious Budokan, Chidorigafuchi ceremonies. Friday marked the 63rd anniversary of the public radio address made by Emperor Hirohito, posthumously known as Showa, announcing Japan’s surrender, ending World War II. Fukuda, echoing several of his predecessors, expressed “deep remorse” to all of the war dead, adding that Japan caused “tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations.” Fukuda, widely known for his relatively dovish stance toward Asia, did not visit the contentious war-linked Yasukuni Shrine, which many parts of Asia in particular regard as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism. Instead, he attended the war dead commemoration ceremony and visited the religiously unaffiliated Chidorigafuchi war memorial, near Yasukuni, dedicated to unknown Japanese service members.
“The government should seriously consider establishing a memorial facility that is not based on a particular religion and one where everyone can unite and pay tribute,” Kono said. “Our nation and our neighboring countries still have unresolved issues related to history that have become a thorn and are causing friction.” Meanwhile, at a news conference Friday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said the government “does not need to take action” immediately to push for the alternative memorial facility.
Every year, the spotlight shines on the shrine and whether the prime minister and any of his Cabinet ministers will pay a visit. —————- War widow - now 94-year old - goes to first ceremony. Her husband was killed in the Philippines. Kyodo News, Over the past 63 years, Yotsu Iimura had not joined the annual national memorial ceremony on Aug. 15 to commemorate the war dead. But this year, the 94-year-old decided to come although she is in a wheelchair, becoming one of the oldest relatives of the war dead attending the ceremony, which is seeing fewer and fewer participants as the survivors pass away with the years. “My heart is too full to talk. I’m really happy,” she said, entering Tokyo Budokan Hall. This year, 4,579 surviving kin of deceased Japanese soldiers attended the Budokan ceremony. A decade ago, the number was 5,662. Iimura had hesitated to attend because “many bereaved families had been attending the ceremony,” she said. “But not much time is left for me, either. I feel lonely since fewer families are attending,” she said. Iimura’s husband, Shoji, was killed in action on Luzon Island in the Philippines at age 31. He had been a refrigerator maker before being drafted in 1944. Iimura learned in 1947 that her husband was dead. ———————– Bunce served as chief of the Religious and Cultural Resources Division at the general headquarters of the Allied Forces, working to separate militarism and nationalism from Shinto to promote the demilitarization of Japan under orders from the Allied commander in chief, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the paper said. But Bunce allowed Shinto, stripped of its nationalism, to continue and believers to worship privately, it said. A native of Ohio, Bunce earned a master’s degree in history from Ohio State University in 1933 and taught English at a Japanese junior college during the 1930s, according to the Washington Post. After the Occupation, he became a diplomat and served at embassies in India and South Korea before retiring in 1971. Permalink | |